In elaborating this work, a hard difficulty has been that of choosing only one book (and leaving any other Chesterton’s writings aside). When we confront Chesterton, we face a giant –and not only in the physical sense- who left a deep mark on his Country’s literature and on that of many other countries and people of the most different intellectual backgrounds. The exposition seeks to include a brief description of the work itself, but also some words about the author and the time in which he lived. It is intended as a synthesis, undeniably very incomplete and difficult to achieve in such a short work; it leaves aside important information –for example when a mention is made about a very few number of his writings among his 69 books-. Yet we hope it can do at least for an introduction to the reading of the book here studied.
Chesterton and His Time
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Kensington, England in 1874. He possessed a vigorous intelligence, impressive physical proportions, merry wit, charming personality and natural affability[1]. Despite his efforts to achieve oblivion at the bottom of his class, he was singled out as a boy with distinct literary promise[2]. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, who relieved him of concern with mundane affairs, so that he was able to concentrate completely on his literary efforts. She was, also, a great influence on his conversion to Anglicanism. Though his spiritual journey continued through Catholicism, to which he was received by Reverend John O’Connor, who would become the ‘Fr. Brown’ of Chesterton’s detective stories. His first published volumes were books of verse; soon he wrote about religion, ethics, art, politics, sociology and literature[3].
By the time when Chesterton was born, Victoria was the Queen of England, and remained so for a long period (1837-1901) in benefit for the stability and growth of Great Britain[4]. The telegraph, steamboats, thousands of miles of railroads and military power on the sea, helped to the building of a world-wide empire. India became a colony of the British Crown by 1858. Between 1880 and 1890, more than 200,000 emigrants traveled from England towards United States or the British colonies. When our writer was 27, King Edward II came into power, and later on (in 1910) George the V did, until Chesterton’s death. When he was around 36, World War I began. Chesterton underwent with his fellow citizens the effects of the Great Depression (1929). Three years before Chesterton’s death, Hitler got into power in Germany (1933); and when he died, the ghost of a second Great War threatened Europe and the whole world.
Chesterton’s Writings
Chesterton lived intensely his own time, and was concerned with its problems and circumstances. Through his writings, he opposed the Boer War (1809-1902). In his Eugenics and Other Evils (1922) he criticized a popular opinion (at least among certain circles of thought) that was going to take form in the Nazi racism. A newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a “genuine” nationalism for India[5]. He expressed his opinions on topics of social relevance in his time (still important today) such as feminism and womanhood, education, family and other social and moral issues, in his book What’s Wrong with the World (1910). He has many fiction works that made him famous too, such as his Fr. Brown stories (between 1911 and 1936), The Club of Queer Trades (1905), The Man Who was Thursday (1908).
Yet his interests extended also to a field that strongly touched his personal experience. After a journey of nearly fifty years, having being pagan at twelve, agnostic at sixteen, Christian and then Anglican after his marriage, he converted to Catholicism (in 1922). Some of his most famous works have to do with apologetics either directly or indirectly. He wrote Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1909); a very popular Saint Francis of Assisi (1924); and also Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox” (1933), a biography of the saint praised by figures such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Yet, probably his most famous work on religious topics, together with Orthodoxy, is The Everlasting Man (1925).
The Everlasting Man
Considered by some[6] his greatest masterpiece, the book explores the origin of man and the various religious attitudes throughout history. Chesterton shows how the fulfillment of all of man’s desires takes place in Christ and Christ’s Church. The author suggests a historical (rather than theological) perspective, in response to the Outline of History, by H.G. Wells, in which Christianity was given much less space than, for example, the Persians’ campaign against the Greeks[7]. Written in prose and often classified as apologetic in kind, his study is not especially concerned with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. In his words:
Much of it is devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking fact[8].
For Chesterton, there is a deep difference between animals and men, and to this he devotes the first part of the book (On the Creature Called Man):
In the land lit by neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad daylight, there are many and very various things, motionless and moving. There moves among them a race that is in its relation to others a race of gods. The fact is not lessened but emphasised because it can behave like a race of demons… Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as the literal flame that he alone has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world makes that world visible… [9]
And in order to stress this wonder, the author goes through a good deal of wit and humor speaking about the ideas of evolution, a very controversial issue in his time especially among scholars (as it is still today, though the positions have being moderated). In short, Chesterton shows that, no matter how slowly and complicated the ‘evolution’ may be explained, it will not be able to give account of a difference in quality, not in quantity, between an animal -even any living thing or anything at all in the universe different from men- and a human being. Curiously enough, his analysis still holds for today, the discussion is not over, and his arguments stand in favor of a view of man in a completely separated ‘category’ in relation to the rest of visible things.
But why does Chesterton employ a whole part of the book to speak about the ‘Cave-Man’ and his differences with the rest of the universe? Because he has a special feature: he, a thinking being, seems to have discovered in the rest of creatures (and even in his own composition) a map, a design, an order addressed to an end. Such a design can only come from someone intelligent –like man himself-. Yet that someone is not present, or at least not visible. If he ever was, he is gone; gone, at least, before the apparition of man on Earth:
They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower. But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think, it was obvious that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was someone else, some strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they were designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire…[10]
About this mysterious being ‘behind the scene’, many things have been said along time. They are either similar to myths or to philosophy, according to different cultures and times. But there is no doubt that such a matter has been important to man since there is record of men as men. Chesterton is referring, in other words, to the religiosity that accompanies the essence of the human being. Yet the English Writer doesn’t stop there. He’s only taking ground for a second and more audacious step: there is one exception within the different religious conceptions, one that stands out and cannot be placed in any category with the rest. One that fulfils myth and philosophy, and which claims something new, unheard of, altogether: the idea that God became a man. To this ‘exception’ Chesterton dedicates the book’s second part (On the Man Called Christ):
Right in the middle of all of these things stands up an enormous exception… It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man Who Made the World…[11]
But where is the originality of this special kind of religiosity? Why should it be considered an exception? In other words, What could be the distinction between Muslims and Confucionists, Christians and Budists? Do not all of them have a certain sensitivity regarding the order of the world, maybe a group of traditions followed, a perspective of the world and man, and even a Starter or Leader of that special movement or religion? For Chesterton, no one, but the Christian, is speaking about something really new. All refer to a maker, or at least to an order. Their leaders claim to have had a particular experience of the transcendent, even to have received a message from the designer of the universe to deliver. But no one ever, in any religion, said to be himself God:
It is simply false to say that other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious master and maker, of whom the world had dreamed and disputed… The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being… [12]
And, still ‘worse’, not only a man claimed to be God, but he’s had followers, even a whole institution, testifying about him, for more than two thousand years, with a value given to tradition, authority, dogmatism and refusal to retract and modify, as that of a man with a message relating to a fact (not only to a ‘belief’ in the light sense of the word as used many times in today’s common speech, for example when one ‘believes’ that tomorrow it will rain):
What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful pagan poets, about the priests and people of the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they were messengers… The mystery is how anything so startling should have remained defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural… I have admitted freely that, considering the incident in itself, a man who says he is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass… But this madness has remained sane. The madhouse has been a house to which, age after age, men are continually coming back as to a home [13].
The whole point of the book goes far beyond in its consequences than just another opinion. And they become the stronger, the lesser in the book has being used ‘scientific’ vocabulary or any kind of language that only a few can understand. The frightening thing about Chesterton is precisely this: his common sense, his simple speech, and –added to that- an incredible capacity for humor, which make his reading not only interesting but also enjoyable. Among the many witnesses to the power of Chesterton’s common sense, speaks C.S. Lewis describing his own conversion:
(…) I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive ‘apart from his Christianity’. Now, I veritably believe, I thought –I didn’t of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense- that Christianity itself was very sensible ‘apart from its Christianity’. [14]
The brief analysis ends here. For the argument of the book we’ve followed what the author itself suggests as a summary of what he wanted to say. It seems a quality of almost all of his works, an immense synthetic capacity (very poorly imitated in this essay), stressful of a few ideas, rich in examples, sober in number of words, short in sentences. The Everlasting Man, one of Chesterton’s greatest apologetic books, reveal him –and this will be our last remark- not only as an author of his time –which he was-, and not only as a good apologist –which undoubtedly he became-, not even only a great writer: he deserves to be considered a ‘classic’ in the sense of a figure in literature who transcends his time and even the areas of knowledge about which he writes, and touches in a singular way the men and women of his time, of our time, of the future.
[1] From the Foreword to: G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy (The Romance of Faith). Image Books. New York 1990. [2] From the Foreword to: G.K. Chesterton. The Man Who was Thursday. Penguin Books. London 1986. [3] From the Foreword to: G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy (The Romance of Faith). Image Books. New York 1990. [4] This paragraph has been enriched with information from: Biblioteca de Consulta Microsoft Encarta 2004. [5] According to Michael Piff, in: http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/
[6] For example, Ronald Knox, see: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0085.html
[7] According to Joseph Pearce, in: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0085.html
[8] G.K. Chesterton. The Everlasting Man. Reprinted 1993, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, USA, p. 7. [9] Op. cit., pp. 262-271. (For purposes of simplicity, we are taking the following quotations from the summary that Chesterton himself makes of his exposition at the end of the book.) [10] Ibidem. [11] Ibidem. [12] Ibidem. [13] Ibidem. [14] C.S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy. ‘C.S. Lewis Signature Classics’ Edition. Harper-Collins Publisher. London 2002, p. 260.