G.K. Chesterton’s Modern Relevance
By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was an important London literary figure for four decades. He produced a steady stream of popular essays, poetry, fiction, and biographies (of, among others, Dickens, Browning, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Francis of Assisi). T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis admired him; Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells were his friends-with whom, he said, he “never differed except in opinion.” William F. Buckley calls him “the Shakespeare of the aphorism.” Miraculously, though, his appealing, clear, quotable writing is not shallow. The eminent historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson labeled him “one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed.”
Yet, apart from his detective stories and novels, Chesterton’s work is largely ignored today. When he is recalled, it is frequently more for his image-bulky, wearing an inverness cape and a pince-nez, holding a sword cane-than for his ideas. This is a pity, for his voice has lost little of its relevance and none of its unique personality.
Chesterton was trained in art, but became one of England‘s leading journalists. He also used his talents to defend religious orthodoxy-battling atheistic humanism and what he saw as a cult of science-in a distinctly unconventional way. Books like Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1908) are still well worth reading. In 1922, Chesterton converted to Catholicism, after leaning that way for a long time. (Twelve years before his baptism, he had delivered the characteristically confident verdict that, “if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic skepticism or in the Catholic creed.”) His “Father Brown” mysteries wittily contrast the wisdom of the Church with the spurious wisdom of the World.
Sometimes he seems almost prophetic. Already in 1921, when the Bolshevik revolution was but four years old, Chesterton had taken its measure. “It is now both an ideal and a reality,” he said of Marxism, “and its name is slavery.” Even today, after the fall of communism, notwithstanding Stalin’s purge trials, the Ukrainian terror famine, Solzhenitsyn’s revelations about the Gulag, the Chinese “Cultural Revolution,” the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, and the prisons of Castro’s Cuba, many Western intellectuals fail to see what Chesterton understood. Yet he foresaw still more. “The next great heresy,” he wrote, also in the 1920s, “is going to be simply an attack on morality, and especially on sexual morality. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan.”
The best way to offer a taste of Chesterton is to allow him to speak for himself. Here are a few passages from his voluminous writings, chosen essentially at random (and there is much, much more where these passages come from):
“Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”
“Tragedy is that point when things are left to God and men can do no more.”
“[St. Thomas] Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and drab outwardly for others, and the gold next to his heart.”
“As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War-they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood.”
“I fear I shall remain one of those who believe in spirits much too easily ever to become a spiritualist. Modern people think the supernatural so improbable that they want to see it. I think it so probable that I leave it alone. Spirits are not worth all this fuss; I know that, for I am one myself.”