Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown and Human Nature

"My friend, I want to tell you and all your modern world a secret. You will not get to the good in people till you have been through the bad in them.” 

Father Brown, The Donnignton Affair

Since picking up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in a discount bookshop in the halcyon days of my childhood, I have loved reading detective stories. Over a decade (and half a lifetime) later, while I am still a fan of Sherlock, there is another sleuth who just about beats him in the list of my favourite detectives.

While Sherlock Holmes solves a crime with cold, scientific deduction, G.K Chesterton’s Father Brown unmasks the criminal through philosophical insights, empathy and intuition. Not only do they employ different methods, they approach crime with contrasting worldviews.
Nine times out of ten, the murderers in Sherlock Holmes are “Villains”. Often, those Villains are professional criminals. Sometimes, those Villains will be disguised as “Good Men”. Alternatively, those who at first appear like Villains will turn out to be Good Men. There are exceptions, of course, but, more often than not in the world of 221b Baker Street, the criminals are Villains even before they commit the crime. The job of the detective is not only to solve the crime, it is to unmask the Villain who has been hiding as a Good Man. It seems, to me at least, to be a black and white world in which not only acts, but people, can be divided essentially into “Good” and “Bad”.

The cases of Father Brown are rather different. The murderers are not simply people who have hidden the fact that they are Villains. The apparent Villains aren’t revealed to be Good Men in disguise, but rather men, who, despite being thoroughly unpleasantly, are innocent of the crime in question. Sometimes the criminal’s lives have been marked by deception and criminality. But, more often than not, the culprits are normal people who have committed terrible crimes. In order to solve the crime, Father Brown thinks like the murderer. Rather than seeing the criminal as “the other”, he tries to understand their motive and their justification. He doesn’t just empathise with those who are guilty, he sympathises with them.

Contrary to what you might assume, Father Brown’s empathy with murderers is not based on the idea that humans are fundamentally good. Neither does it come from a belief in relative morality. In fact, as a conservative Catholic priest, he believes that all humans are equally corrupt. He believes in moral absolutes that humans are unable to abide by. As a result, he looks at murderers not with self-righteousness but with humility. He does not think that they are inhuman. In fact, he sees them as just as human as he is. They are equal to him. He looks at the guilty and thinks, as the saying goes, “there but for the grace of God.”

According to Father Brown’s Christian worldview, no-one is perfect. Is that a depressing world view? Not at all. In this worldview, no one has any grounds to be self-righteous. No one is a lost cause. It says something that, despite having been written long before the abolition of the death sentence, Father Brown never talks ominously about the gallows. There is always hope of redemption for those who have done terrible things. That’s not just the experience of one fictional Catholic Priest, it’s the experience of so many people throughout history.

“All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe…We matter to God- God only knows why.”

Father Brown, A Quick One