"I want to pay tribute...to G.K. Chesterton, whose paradoxical and savory wisdom was a knighthood of God."

-Jacques Maritain, "Contemporary Renewals in Religious Thought"
(found in book Religion and the Modern World, p. 8)

Trinity Sunday

If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, 'God is Love.' Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.

-The Everlasting Man (1925)

It seems nowadays to be counted a prodigy that the truisms can come true. The discovery that a new notion is nonsense is itself treated as a new notion. There is a tradition, let us say, that jumping off a high precipice is prejudicial to the health; and therefore nobody does it. Then appears a progressive prophet and reformer, who points out that we really know nothing about it, because nobody does it. He urges, truly, that you and I have but rarely tested the matter by ourselves falling off high cliffs and carefully noting the results. He insists that there is seldom a long queue, or continuous procession of persons, filing past Dover up to Shakespeare's Cliff with this scientific object; and that there is, therefore, no sufficient number of cases of the needs of induction. At last some highly scientific character does jump off Shakespeare's Cliff, and is found dead on Dover sands. And the other scientists, standing round his corpse in a ring, do not regard it as the remains of a fool or a hero or an example of the ancient human tragedy. They regard it as if it were some entirely new and interesting sea-beast thrown up by the sea. They have made a discovery. They hardly realise that it is merely the discovery that all their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers were right. But they are bound to admit it is the discovery that they themselves were wrong. And that is a very astonishing discovery indeed.

-March 9, 1918, Illustrated London News

Satan rebuking sin is a mild figure of speech for the enormous notion of a politician denouncing deceptions.

-December 22, 1906, Illustrated London News

Science and mathematics writer Martin Gardner was a noted Chestertonian, and reprinted about one-third of the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" (from GKC's book Orthodoxy) in his 1948 anthology Great Essays in Science, entitling the selection "The Logic of Elfland". While Gardner's statement concerning Chesterton's scientific views are not completely accurate, nevertheless I wished to include below his preface to the selection.

It may come as a shock to many readers to find a selection by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) included here. The rotund British writer was not noted for his knowledge of things scientific. He never, for example, could quite bring himself to accept the theory of man's descent from lower animals. Yet there are times, as in the following selection, when he startles you with unexpected scientific insight.

Chesterton's topic is nothing less than the fundamental contrast between deductive logic, true of all possible worlds, and inductive logic, capable only of telling us how we may reasonably expect this world to behave. Let us hasten to add that Chesterton's analysis is in full agreement with the views of modern logicians. Perhaps his "test of the imagination" is not strictly accurate— who can "imagine" the four-dimensional constructions of relativity?-but in essence his position is unassailable. Logical and mathematical statements are true by definition. They are "empty tautologies," to use a current phrase, like the impressive maxim that there are always six eggs in half a dozen. Nature, on the other hand, is under no similar constraints. Fortunately, her "weird repetitions," as GK calls them, often conform to surprisingly low-order equations. But as Hume and others before Hume made clear, there is no logical reason why she should behave so politely.

The following selection is taken from, of all places, Orthodoxy, Chesterton's most famous work of Christian (it was published fourteen years before he became a Catholic) apologetics. The style is that for which the author is justly famous-brilliant, witty, alliterative, dazzling in its metaphors and verbal swordplay, and a joy to read even when you disagree with him.

[Modern] social reform is something much worse than giving all wealth to the Government. It is rather giving all government to the wealthy. It is arming plutocracy with bureaucracy.

-March 1,1919, Illustrated London News

If optimism means a general approval, it is certainly true that the more a man becomes an optimist the more he becomes a melancholy man. If he manages to praise everything, his praise will develop an alarming resemblance to a polite boredom. He will say that the marsh is as good as the garden; he will mean that the garden is as dull as the marsh. He may force himself to say that emptiness is good, but he will hardly prevent himself from asking what is the good of such good. This optimism does exist -- this optimism which is more hopeless than pessimism -- this optimism which is the very heart of hell. Against such an aching vacuum of joyless approval there is only one antidote -- a sudden and pugnacious belief in positive evil. This world can be made beautiful again by beholding it as a battlefield. When we have defined and isolated the evil thing, the colours come back into everything else. When evil things have become evil, good things, in a blazing apocalypse, become good. There are some men who are dreary because they do not believe in God; but there are many others who are dreary because they do not believe in the devil. The grass grows green again when we believe in the devil, the roses grow red again when we believe in the devil. 

No man was more filled with the sense of this bellicose basis of all cheerfulness than Dickens. He knew very well the essential truth, that the true optimist can only continue an optimist so long as he is discontented. For the full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything, we have missed something -- war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.

-Charles Dickens (1906)

The great strength of Christian sanctity has always been simply this - that the worst enemies of the saints could not say of the saints anything worse than they said of themselves. It is disheartening to go on abusing a man while he is quite unconscious of your presence, but is in a low and furious undertone abusing himself. This has always been the strong point of even the most commonplace Christianity. Suppose the village Atheist had a sudden and splendid impulse to rush into the village church and denounce everybody there as miserable offenders. It was always quite possible that he might break in at the exact moment when they were saying the same thing themselves. You can say anything against a man who praises himself, but a man who blames himself is invulnerable.

-October 12, 1907, Illustrated London News

The truth is that our public life consists almost exclusively of small men. Our public men are small because they have to prove that they are in the commonplace interpretation clever, because they have to pass examinations, to learn codes of manners, to imitate a fixed type. It is in private life that we find the great characters. They are too great to get into the public world. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a great man to enter into the kingdoms of the earth. The truly great and gorgeous personality, he who talks as no one else could talk and feels with an elementary fire, you will never find this man on any cabinet bench, in any literary circle, at any society dinner. Least of all will you find him in artistic society; he is utterly unknown in Bohemia. He is more than clever, he is amusing. He is more than successful, he is alive. You will find him stranded here and there in all sorts of unknown positions, almost always in unsuccessful positions. You will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial traveller like Micawber. You will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks, like Swiveller. You will find him as an unsuccessful actor, like Crummles. You will find him as an unsuccessful doctor, like Sawyer. But you will always find this rich and reeking personality where Dickens found it -- among the poor. For the glory of this world is a very small and priggish affair, and these men are too large to get in line with it. They are too strong to conquer.

-Charles Dickens (1906)

"We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand."

When I was in America I had the feeling that it was far more foreign than France or even than Ireland. And by foreign I mean fascinating rather than repulsive. I mean that element of strangeness which marks the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveler himself the almost eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly than in countries counted as more remote from us, in race or religion, a paradox that is one of the great truths of travel.

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading long into it our own character. If when we see an event we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be pretty certain that we had ourselves prepared the explanation before we saw the event. It follows from this that the best picture of a foreign people can probably be found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw some light on the truth.

-What I Saw in America (1922)

What a cat really wants is a riddle as ancient as what the Sphinx really means.

-November 21, 1912, New Witness

"..it uses Spring as a symbol of Easter; not Easter as a symbol of spring."

Christians and all inhabitors of the ancient culture feel that Spring is the symbol of Easter. Materialists, notably all sorts of atheist anthropologists, hold that Easter was only the symbol of Spring. Professors of folk-lore insisted that primitive men (with whom they seemed to be on very intimate terms) had made up a rather unnatural masquerade of myth, merely to cover the natural facts of experience. They concealed the fact that the flowers return, under the parable of a god returning. By the time that commonsense began to pluck up courage to question what were called the Conclusions of Science, it became apparent that there were a good many questions which Science could not answer; and a good many points on which her conclusions were anything but conclusive. Why should anyone want to cover up ordinary facts with an extraordinary story? Why should anybody think he could keep the grass a secret, by the invention of a grass-god? And why could not primitive men be primitive enough to leave plain facts as they were? Was it not much more natural to imagine flowers or foliage as ornaments for a god or hero, than to imagine a hollow idol invented only to stand between men and flowers? Is it not more sane to say that the visible renewal of the earth gives hints or signs to those who already believe in heaven?.......There is nothing but nonsense, therefore, in all pretences that the mere round of Nature itself is the source of our highest hopes; or could by itself have evolved all that is meant by Resurrection. It is the soul that has received an unspeakable secret from heaven, which it can only express in images of the earth; and naturally expresses in terms of the temporary resurrections of the earth. In other words, it uses Spring as a symbol of Easter; not Easter as a symbol of Spring.

March 26, 1932, G.K.'s Weekly