Chesterton, Retirement, and Abnegation

I do not intend in these remarks to look at Chesterton in his retirement, for the simple fact that he never seems to have retired. He finished writing his autobiography a few weeks before his death on the 14th of June, 1936. The Notre Dame archives have the original copy that came off Dorothy Collins’ typewriter, and I have held it in my hands to look at the tracks of his own green editor’s pencil making insertions and elisions.

No, I have no material to discuss about his retirement, but I am going to look at Chesterton in mine.ⁱ I retired in June 2022, after an almost perfectly symmetrical life, finishing school at age 36 and spending 34 years teaching. Placing my retirement against his non-retirement has provoked me to make some comparisons. Let me begin with some mathematical.

By the numbers

He was 6’4” and at his heaviest topped 300 pounds; I am 6’2” and flirted with 285 before I found an app that brought me down to my svelte 240. He married Frances in 1901 and celebrated 35 years; I married Elizabeth in 1972, and we are one month from 53 years. He entered the Catholic Church in 1922 at the age of 48; I entered the Catholic Church in 1991 at the age of 39. Thus, he was in the Catholic Church for 14 years; I have been in her for 34 so far. We will both be in her for eternity. He says of himself, “I am the sort of man who came to Christ from Pan and Dionysius and not from Luther or Laud; that the conversion I understand is that of the pagan and not the puritan.”ⁱⁱ I did come from Luther (but not Laud), and from a puritan tradition as it manifested in Norwegian Haugian Lutheranism. This was as far from paganism as their condemnation of drinking beer, playing cards, and going to movies could take them. I have always been surprised that I understood Chesterton’s conversion as well as I have, and he mine.

What is retirement like, this retirement that Chesterton missed out on? Every day is a Saturday. I saw a meme of a “retirement clock” in which the 12 numerals on the dial were replaced by the seven days of the week, something I newly appreciate as Elizabeth or I truly say to each other, in all seriousness, with sincere curiosity, “What day is it?” Chesterton admits to having a premonition of this. “When I am on a holiday,” he writes, “I find it difficult even to remember holidays. Certain dark superstitions, on which we need not dwell, lead me to inquire occasionally of my fellow-creatures whether it is Sunday or Friday; but, except for such inquiries, I should not have the wildest idea of what was the day of the week.”ⁱⁱⁱ My calendar is as free as it has been since kindergarten. In fact, I finished writing this paper last February 2024. I literally wrote those words: “finished last February” last February.^iv

In its shortest form, retirement is the end of a career. I once heard that the word is related to the word “car,” from the French carriere, meaning “road or racecourse.” Retirement is not the end of life, but it is getting off the racecourse: abandonment of trying to go somewhere. In the case of an academic, the travel is by hot air balloon, which one spends many years in graduate school inflating. It is only when the balloon deflates at retirement that one discovers a startling and somewhat disturbing fact: all this time, it has not been filled with hot air; it has been filled with hubris. I don’t say this in an entirely negative way. One needs a kind of hubris to face the dissertation committee, to submit that first article, or to withstand rejection letters from the publisher. Then one needs a kind of hubris to say “Yes, I’d like to be on that committee,” and “Yes, I can teach a course on that subject.”

Chesterton knows what I mean. “I was broke,” he writes, with

only ten shillings in my pocket. Leaving my worried wife, I went down Fleet Street, got a shave, and then ordered for myself, at the Cheshire Cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favourite dishes and a bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to my publishers fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and outlined the story of “Napoleon of Notting Hill.” But I must have twenty pounds, I said, before I begin. “We will send it to you on Monday.” “If you want the book,” I replied, “you will have to give it to me today as I am disappearing to write it.” They gave it.^v

That is self-confidence, that is self-assurance. And, if it is not an oxymoron, that is benign hubris.

But at retirement, while the career deflates, one looks back with mild embarrassment at all the posturing, lecturing, and attempts to be clever. One’s embarrassment is more than mild when inflated vainglory has turned to vanity. Then one experiences the deflation as a kind of penance. And yet, when a call comes from Dale Ahlquist, there is a spurt of reinflation, enough to carry my balloon from South Bend to New Orleans. And here I am.

How do I spend my time now? I ascend to what was previously a bedroom on the second floor, but which I prefer to picture as a castle turret atop a circular staircase, such as Rapunzel might have occupied. The tower is not ivory anymore, but it is mine, and when I go there, I do not find myself thinking “I have one more thing to write,” I find myself thinking “I have a hundred more things to read.” And who am I reading? I have wandered into a meadow which had before repulsed me slightly. Spiritual theology had always appeared disorganized and unruly, and the particular spirituality of post-Reformation Catholic writers (between 1500 and 1900) appeared additionally harsh. Their language of abnegation, self-denial, annihilation, and mortification was off-putting and sounded like a very grim and gloomy moral program. But their countenance changed when I placed them into my world of liturgical theology. They sound completely different against a more transcendent horizon, which, I propose, is the act of liturgy before a God who deserves and demands our total worship. I call them, therefore, theologians of liturgical abnegation.^vi

So three conversation partners have been trialoging in my mind. The first is Chesterton, an old friend; the second is the voice of the theologians of abnegation, my newfound friends; the third is lessons of retirement. Here are five of our chats: on reading books, writing them,, the value of memory, and finitude.

On Reading Books

I don’t know how many books Chesterton read. It would be an impossible task to find out, as he always seemed to be reading. I used to read physical books (now I read PDF copies on my iPad), but a retirement mortification required reducing the linear feet of bookshelves in my Notre Dame office by half, from 168 to 84, in my home office. It will probably be reduced by half again to 42 feet upon our next move into an apartment, and to 21 feet at the nursing home, and I will only carry away 2 or 3 books with me in the coffin, like a Roman buried with his sword.

The purpose of reading has changed some, too. Jean Grou advises me to avoid “mental curiosity,” by which he means “that immoderate desire of learning and knowing, which causes people to study various sciences eagerly, and generally superficially: to read every book as it comes out, rather for the sake of showing off than of improvements.”^vii Francois Malaval asks a reader to interrupt himself from time to time, in order to be recollected in God. Then God will “perfect your knowledge by His light in so admirable a way, that instead of remaining in your memory as it used to do, that which you read will pass unconsciously into your will.”^viii What counts, all the liturgical theologians of abnegation say, are acts of the will.

I don’t think I ever read Chesterton out of curiosity of this kind. He did not stroll around truths; he penetrated them. Recall that what attracted him to Frances was that she actually practiced religion. “This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbors, new and incomprehensible.”^ix

I think Chesterton read practically (for practical reasons) and wrote practically (for practical results), and never for the vanity Tronson warns about. “Are we not actuated by vanity – being very willing to talk of spiritual things, whilst shrinking from the effort of reducing them to practice?”^x

On Writing Books

Chesterton completed about 200 books; I have done 16. The first was under the whip of the examination committee, then transmogrified into something a publisher might take. The second book was as an amateur—or the love of it—on Chesterton. What happens to a book once it is released from your mental cage is out of your control. Chesterton recalls writing “a book called Twelve Types. The last I heard about the bundle of historical sketches was that one copy of it was bought by mistake for a library of technical works on printing; under the impression that it explained the differences of Small Pica and Long Primer. Perhaps this was the only copy of the book that ever was sold.”^xi I wrote an article on Thomas’s baptism of Aristotle for Catholic science and used a Chesterton quote concerning salamanders, so I titled it “Of Salamanders, Saints and Scientists,” and one day stumbled across it in the ATLA list of zoology articles. I’m sure some graduate student was in for a surprise.

As an academic, I have the garden-variety academic vanity about fame. I am pleased to have written some books; they are on the shelves of some libraries somewhere; some of them have been reviewed; all of them will be forgotten. I was startled the other day to see that the aforementioned edited version of my dissertation was now available for 70 cents at a website for used, discarded, surplus, rejected, and unwanted books. (Not the website’s real name, but that is how it sticks in my memory.) One Christmas, years ago, my young sons entered into a competition of insults over how bad the gift the other was going to find under the tree. When one teased, “You’re getting socks and underwear,” the other replied, “Well, you’re getting one of Papa’s books.”

Diego de Estella defines a vain thing as “that which filleth not the place where it is.”^xii Augustin Baker warns against what he calls “much and willing speaking,”^xiii which remark cuts now in recollection of being enticed to classroom podiums in an effort to be clever.

Chesterton’s sense of humility relied on what the abnegation theologians meant by nothingness. “Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God.”^xiv It is humility that perpetually puts us back in the primal darkness, he adds. The artist Chesterton understood that light is better appreciated against the background of darkness, and the theologian Chesterton understood that creation is better appreciated against the background of nothingness. “Until we realise that things might not be we cannot realise that things are … Until we picture non-entity we underrate the victory of God, and can realise none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.”^xv Sr. Teresa Gertude sums up the thought of all these theologians of abnegation when she succinctly says, “Humility, properly understood, is the virtue resulting from a full and complete recognition on the part of the creature of its position regarding the Creator.”^xvi

On Memory

The lapses of memory are something to behold in retirement. I have actually said out loud: “What did I come into this room for?” I heard myself stammer one day, “Our Lady of Guada … Guada … What is it? It’s not Guatemala.” You won’t believe how many searches I have done trying to write this talk – not of the internet but of my own files. I feel the feeling I had when I wrote something, but can’t remember the words, and must try various searches to recover it.

We all know about Chesterton’s legendary and amusing forgetfulness. The telegram to Frances: “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I be?” (She called him back home to try again on the morrow.) The wire to Charles Rowley: “Am I coming to you tonight or what?” (His reply: “Not this Tuesday but next Wednesday.”) New suits forgotten under hotel beds, the famous sword-walking stick misplaced, having the hansom cab go to three newsstands to buy his own publication in order to get the address of his new office. “The Chestertons’ maid told Mrs Mills how Chesterton would flood the bathroom floor, which required immediate mopping up; on one occasion, while waiting for him to come out, she heard a loud splash and then a groan: ‘Dammit, I’ve been in here already.’”^xvii A similar experience accounts for how I have three jars of tartar sauce in the pantry.

I have been finding that memories come unbidden, from across my whole life, and I think it is more accurate to speak of them in the plural. The singular—“a memory”—is the result of the intellect making a selection among them, and stitching them together into a narrative, but the memories themselves are plural. Chesterton confirms this when he wrote, “When a memory comes back sharply and suddenly, piercing the protection of oblivion, it appears for an instant exactly as it really was. If we think of it often, while its essentials doubtless remain true, it becomes more and more our own memory of the thing rather than the thing remembered.”^xviii I can remember the room in which I ate the meal, but not the restaurant or the city where it was located. On and on they march, like puppets crossing the stage of the Golden Theatre Chesterton loved so much.

The idea of memory as a sustained sense makes me conclude that one can do work with the memories. They are raw material for practicing a virtue while sitting there in the chair. During the memory one can make acts of hope, forgiveness, love, praise, on the one hand; or acts of despair, grudging, envy, or condemnation, on the other. Mother Drane says “What I mean, my dearest Sister, is that we drop many stitches in the web of life, and do well to weep bitter tears over them; but the angels gather them up, and with fingers more skilful than ours weave them into the web of our predestination; and so we offer God a workmanship more perfect and far more beautiful than could have been produced by our own efforts.”^xix

On Finitude

Chesterton died at age 62; my death date is yet to be determined, but at the moment, I am 11 years beyond him. At my age, my father had already been dead 4 years; my mother had only 5 more to go. (They died 10 feet and 20 years apart from each other in the apartment.) Before retirement, I tended to count up from a known marker in the past: 73 years from birth, 53 years from the wedding day, 23 years from being hired at ND. Now I count down from an unknown marker in the future: how many more Easter Vigils? How much longer can we live in this house and handle its repair and care? If we bought our car at the end of its lease, would it last us until we die? With startling accuracy, Nieremberg says “All that has an end is short.”^xx In other words, people seek to be remembered, but the world they want to remember them won’t last. “If God should bestow upon thee this life only for a quarter of an hour, and if thou knew likewise that the world, within an hour after thy death, were also to end, wouldst thou spend that short time in ostentation and setting forth thyself, whereby to raise a fame that might endure that short time after thy life?”^xxi Many people know an early poem by Chesterton:

Here dies another day.
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?^xxii

Why have I been allowed 26,645 days (multiplying days in a year times my age)?

I find poignant the remarks about death that Chesterton made to Frances upon the death of her sister, Gertrude. “I am so glad to hear you say that, in your own words, ‘it is good for us to be here’—where you are at present. The same remark, if I remember right, was made on the mountain of the Transfiguration.” He goes on to propose that we should repeat Peter’s remark

in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life … ‘It is good for us to be here – it is good for us to be here,’ repeating itself eternally. And if, after many joys and festivals and frivolities, it should be our fate to have to look on while one of us is, in a most awful sense of the words, ‘transfigured before our eyes’: shining with the whiteness of death—at least, I think, we cannot easily fancy ourselves wishing not to be at our post. Not I, certainly. It was good for me to be there.^xxiii

He wrote this in 1899—still nearly a quarter century before he entered the Church. This is proof to me that most converts – himself, myself, and I suppose most others – become Catholic in their heart and mind some years before they get around to doing the paperwork with Rome. In an undated letter, but juxtaposed by Masie Ward next to the above, he writes,

We could not say that Gertrude’s death is happy or providential or sweet or even perhaps good. But it is something. ‘Beautiful’ is a good word – but ‘precious’ is the only right word … It is this sense of preciousness that is really awakened by the death of His saints. Somehow we feel that even their death is a thing of incalculable value and mysterious sweetness: it is awful, tragic, desolating, desperately hard to bear – but still ‘precious.’^xxiv

The preciousness comes, I think, from placing this life against eternity, just as creation was placed against nothingness. It provides clarity. Finally, the whole lifetime must be placed against an eternity. Francis de Sales therefore asks, “what matter, whether we pass through deserts or through fields, provided God is with us, and we go to Heaven. We gather the strawberries and the cherries before the bergamot pears; but it is because their season requires it. Let us allow God to gather what He has planted in His orchard: He takes everything in its season.”^xxv The Master Gardener comes for his harvest in July, August, or September; our souls will be harvested at fifty, seventy, or ninety.

Death may be compared to commencing a journey, and if two people were going to walk 100 miles, what would it matter if one left on Monday and the other on Wednesday? Lehen notices

What difference now between two persons how lived a hundred years ago, one of whom died twenty years before the other? Both have been dead a long time. The separation which then seemed so long and so hard, now appears to them as nothing …. Soon they shall be reunited. The memory of their brief parting will scarcely remain. We act as if we were to live hundreds of years – yes, even forever. What foolishness! How quickly the dying follow the dead! He who sets out only two days after his friend upon the same journey, finds that the distance between them is not so great.^xxvi

We all have people—fathers, mothers, grandparents, perhaps siblings, maybe friends – who have stepped off first, and we will soon follow. It matters less who dies first than whether we are both taking the same trek to arrive at the same destination.

When theologians of abnegation look at death, they speak of it more as a beginning than an end. The birth of a baby is the end of nine months in the womb, true, but it is also the beginning of ninety years in the world. The death of a man is the end of ninety years in this world, true, but it is also the beginning of an eternity. So Nicholas Cross sees death as that which will “put an end to our pilgrimage here, be the upshot of our misery, a return from our banishment, and an entrance into our eternal happiness,”^xxvii and therefore we should submit to the sentence of mortality God has spoken. Life does not explain itself except as the beginning of eternal life. So de Segur concludes that eternity is the only justification of Divine Providence. “It is by the measure of eternity that we must judge all that happens to us in this world. In any other way it is, we repeat, impossible that we should understand any of the designs of God.”^xxviii Bourdaloue expresses the same sentiment. “What deceives us is, that we oftentimes form our judgment of things according to the time in which we now are, and which passes away; but that the judgment of God is formed relatively to eternity, in which we shall hereafter be, and which will never pass away.”^xxix

When done properly, aging yields humility. Embarrassment over the past helps with that. Chesterton was big on humility. He found it not inconsistent with hope, or faith, because it is not inconsistent with love. A final word on that: “The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled. For with the removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly released for incredible voyages.”^xxx

Conclusion

I will let Francis de Sales conclude this talk. These guys have something to say to every occasion, even from where they stand. “When you seek praise by artfully saying that your memory or your intellect is not what it used to be, and therefore you cannot speak so well as you used to do – alas! Who does not see that you are trying make them say that you still speak extremely well?”^xxxi That pretty well describes my talk today.

One day, temporal boasts will subside; temporal works on which we hung our hope for worldly esteem will evaporate; temporal talents and treasures are housed in places where rust and moth corrupt. The books read, the books written, the singularity sought, and the memories accumulated will all cross over the great divide. All these things must cross over the divide, and the final judgment be left to God.

Calvinist George MacDonald is only an honorary member of the Catholic theologians of abnegation, but he understands. He reassures us that after the forgetting, and after the regretting, hope still rules.

Have I forgotten a thought that came to me, which seemed of the truth, and a revealment to my heart? I wanted to keep it, to have it, to use it by and by, and it is gone! I keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till that thought be recovered—to be far more lost, perhaps, in a note-book, into which I shall never look again to find it! I forget that it is live things God cares about—live truths, not things set down in a book, or in a memory, or embalmed in the joy of knowledge, but things lifting up the heart, things active in an active will. True, my lost thought might have so worked; but had I faith in God, the maker of thought and memory, I should know that, if the thought was a truth, and so alone worth anything, it must come again; for it is in God—so, like the dead, not beyond my reach: kept for me, I shall have it again.^xxxii

I find that particularly telling because I used to keep a notebook, but now I’ve forgotten where I even put it. I’m not sure it came home from the office with me. He is confirming the advice of Gonnelieu: “Be not troubled if you remember nothing of what you have read, but commit all that you have read to him who is able to touch & move your heart independently of those truths which you read.”^xxxiii

I used to keep a faux memory by means of syllabi. Whenever I read, whomever I read, it was always with the intention of teaching the writer to a classroom of students. But now there is no more syllabus, no more classroom, no more students, so the purpose of reading loses one of its motives. I enjoy these abnegation authors so much, yet I have no one with whom to share them. Then one day an angel came with this message: “The boss says He loves all these guys, too, and so he’s glad you’re reading them. Stop trying to be a professor of your class, and enroll as a student in his. Keep reading; He’s writing the syllabus.” It is echoed in a number of authors God put on his syllabus for me to find. Adrien Sylvain imagines that if a pen had life, it would have thanked Francis de Sales for having used it and worn it out writing the Treatise on the Love of God. “Enviable pen, what has become of thee? Who knows thee? Who thinks of thee? But I know that Thou my God, Thou wilt be ever mindful of Thy little instrument, particularly when she shall have become worn and completely useless in Thy service.”^xxxiv

Perhaps God is also more pleased to put Chesterton on his eternal syllabus than I was to put him on my temporal one, a syllabus that has now been retired along with me. But when our memory slips, like a bad clutch on a car, we shall take encouragement from the description that Mother Frances Magdalen de Chaugy gives to one of her fellow Visitation Sisters.

Having herself found the reading of good books so useful … she incessantly inculcated the practice of it; saying, for the consolation of those who had not a good memory, that they ought not to fail to devote themselves to it, because they will be like those who touch musk; their hand smells of it from having merely touched it, without carrying away any of it. So, though the memory may retain nothing distinctly that has been read, yet it fails not to be perfumed by it.^xxxv

Like those who touch musk. After touching a good book one’s hand smells of it even if one’s memory does not distinctly retain it. Not a bad way to describe coming into contact with Chesterton, too. Contact with his books leaves musk on the hand.

I have testimony to that. In December 2024, I received the following email – just in time for to be a conclusion to this talk I wrote in February 2025. It came from a student who was in the very first course I ever taught on Chesterton in 2007. I had no contact with him in the 17 intervening years, but the musk was still strong on his hands, as he explains.

Professor Fagerberg,

As I have been taking the time lately to introduce my ten year old son to the glory of Fighting Irish football I have been thinking a lot about my time as a Theology major back when I was a student at Notre Dame.

I doubt you truly understand how much of a massive impact those courses, especially your class on Chesterton which I took as a senior, had on my life and my faith.

I had recently come back to the Christian faith after a few deeply depressing years as an Atheist when I enrolled in your class. While I was raised Catholic this had made very little impression on me and I saw myself as a non-denominational Christian.

Then I started reading Chesterton in your class. I have to admit that for a majority of my classes in college I did as little reading as possible to get by.

This was not the case for GK Chesterton. Once I started working through the reading assignments I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t get enough of anything you assigned. I spent countless hours my senior year pouring through his writing. The Everlasting Man was by far my favorite.

By the time I finished your class I had returned to my Catholic faith with a vigor and devotion I had never had before. My wife and I were married in the Catholic Church (in the Holy Spirit Chapel at Saint Mary’s actually). We are passionately in love with the Catholic Church to this day and are raising our four children in the faith.

I want to sincerely thank you for the gift of not only the fantastic writings of that silly round man but also for the part you played in bringing me closer to Christ.

Chesterton is still an unofficial saint, but he has apparently been doing a saint’s work in this young man’s life, as in so many others.

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