Gilbert K. Chesterton is probably most famous now for the Father Brown short stories (and the recent BBC adaptations of those mysteries) and the short thriller, The Man Who Was Thursday (truly a weird and wild book involving a secret society of anarchists, and a chase through London involving both an elephant and a hot air balloon), but I actually find his non-fiction to be more compelling. Chesterton was a prolific writer, critic, philosopher, and lay theologian, and his words of wisdom are still worth reading, these many years later. 

Heretics is a collection of essays in which Chesterton makes arguments against what he considers to be incorrect in the ideas of the leading thinkers of his day. It sounds like it would be dull, especially if you don’t know who some of these people are are (I plead utter ignorance as to the works of, for example, George Moore, Joseph McCabe, and Lowes Dickinson).

It is decidedly not dull. 

His criticisms of Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Friedrich Nietzsche, and so on (many of whom he knew personally) are both incredibly perceptive and surprisingly funny, an unexpectedly amusing intellectual romp through the political and social debates of his time, always kindly attacking the ideas and not the persons. Chesterton’s words are still relevant and resonant today, and we would all be the wiser if we absorbed some of his lessons on nihilism, utilitarianism, eugenics, and social Darwinism.

Heretics was criticized in that it is, of course, easier to analyze the thinking of others and judge what you deem to be incorrect about it than to make a straightforward case for your own way of thinking. Admitting that challenge to be just, Chesterton published Orthodoxy a few years later, which is a bit of a combination of the personal story of his own path to religion, as well as being a Christian apologetic which attempts to outline a belief system. Again, this is much more entertaining and enlightening than one would think.

Chesterton’s admirers include Marshall McLuhan, Neil Gaiman, Jorge Luis Borges, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and Mahatma Gandhi. James Parker, in The Atlantic, appraised Chesterton thus in 2015: 

“In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debate…Chesterton was a journalist; he was a metaphysician. He was a reactionary; he was a radical. He was a modernist, acutely alive to the rupture in consciousness that produced Eliot’s 'The Hollow Men'; he was an anti-modernist…a parochial Englishman and a post-Victorian gasbag; he was a mystic wedded to eternity. All of these cheerfully contradictory things are true…for the final, resolving fact that he was a genius. Touched once by the live wire of his thought, you don’t forget it … His prose…[is] supremely entertaining, the stately outlines of an older, heavier rhetoric punctually convulsed by what he once called (in reference to the Book of Job) 'earthquake irony.' He fulminates wittily; he cracks jokes like thunder. His message, a steady illumination beaming and clanging through every lens and facet of his creativity, was really very straightforward: get on your knees, modern man, and praise God.”

Chesterton’s eminently quotable, so here are a few examples:

“The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.” (Heretics)

“It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period.” (Heretics)

“The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” (Orthodoxy)

“We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.” (Orthodoxy)

What I admire here most, besides the brilliance of the writing, is the rigor of Chesterton’s thought and his intellectual honesty. If he were, through some time travel, here today, I do not doubt that we would disagree on any number of things. But still, I would love to hear what he would have to say about social media, celebrity culture, populism, international human rights, the popularity of conspiracy theories, neoliberalism, gender identity, stochastic terrorism, postmodernism, religious fundamentalism, structural racism, wealth inequality, what on earth politicians mean when they go on about “our Judeo-Christian heritage,” and much more. (I suppose we’d first have to fill him in on WWII, decolonization, the United Nations, the cold war, space exploration, and the various other major world events that have occurred since 1936.)  Since this is, unfortunately, impossible, here’s what we can do in Chesterton’s absence: think and write clearly and honestly, make arguments in good faith, stand for what we believe in without automatically vilifying those who disagree, enjoy what we can in life and all that is good in it.

BOOKS: Heretics (1905); Orthodoxy (1908)

AUTHOR: G. K. Chesterton

LEAD-IN IMAGE

Book cover, Orthodoxy, Ignatius Press