Introduction

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. 1 CORINTHIANS 3:19

There are Christian writers who are admired, and there are Christian writers who are enjoyed. G. K. Chesterton is one of the very few who is both. He was a London journalist who wrote too much and too fast, a huge, untidy, absent-minded man in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat, who once, the story goes, telegraphed his wife from a railway station to ask where he was supposed to be. He never studied theology and would have laughed at being called a theologian. Yet in an age that was quite sure it had outgrown the Christian faith, he defended it so cheerfully, so cleverly and so generously that even his opponents loved him, and more than a century later readers are still finding in his books that the old faith is larger, stranger and gladder than they had been told.

He did not come to faith by a straight road. As a young art student in the 1890s he passed through a season of near-despair, in which the fashionable pessimism of the day almost swallowed him. He came out of it holding on, as he later said, by a thin thread of gratitude: the overwhelming sense that it was good to exist at all. Slowly, and largely by thinking for himself, he found that the instincts he had learned in the nursery — wonder, thanks, loyalty, the sense that joy hangs on keeping some small condition — fitted the Christian creed like a key in a lock. He told that story in Orthodoxy, the book that has done more than any other of his to bring doubters to Christ, and he spent the rest of his life telling it again in other forms.

Why he still matters

Chesterton matters, first, because he restored wonder to the faith. Many Christians defend their beliefs as though they were a burden to be carried, a set of hard sayings to be accepted with a sigh. Chesterton defended them as though they were good news, which they are. He saw the world as a gift that need not have been given, every dandelion and lamp-post a small astonishment, and he argued that only the Christian account of things explains why the world feels like that, and why we feel that we ought to say thank you for it.

O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever. PSALM 136:1

He matters, second, because he saw where unbelief leads. He lived at the high tide of confidence in reason, science and progress, and he noticed, long before most, that a reason cut loose from God does not end in freedom but in madness, and that a culture which doubts everything will soon doubt its own power to think. Much that he predicted has come to pass. His warnings read today less like the opinions of an Edwardian journalist than like a description of our own century.

He matters, third, because he was a joyful fighter. He loved an argument and chose the biggest opponents he could find, and he never once lost his temper or his friendships in the course of it. He debated George Bernard Shaw for thirty years and remained his friend. He crossed swords with H. G. Wells and was still welcome at his house. In an age of anger, he is a model of how a Christian can contend earnestly for the faith without contempt for those who reject it.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, fifteen short chapters set out his teaching. The first group follows the road of Orthodoxy itself: the wonder and gratitude he called the ethics of elfland; the madman who has lost everything except his reason; the thought that stops thought; and the cosmic loyalty that loves the world enough to change it. The second group turns to what he found when he came to the creed: the furious opposites that Christianity holds in balance; orthodoxy as the most thrilling of adventures; joy as the Christian’s gigantic secret; tradition as the democracy of the dead; humility in its proper place; and the dignity of ordinary life. The third group follows The Everlasting Man: the man in the cave, who is unlike any other creature; the God in the cave at Bethlehem; the strangest story in the world, which is the story of Christ; and the five deaths of the faith, from each of which it has risen. A last teaching chapter turns to St Francis of Assisi, in whom Chesterton saw the holy joy he loved best. A conclusion follows, and a guide to his books.

Each chapter ends with points for reflection and a prayer. Chesterton said grace before everything — before meals, before books, before the theatre, before dipping his pen in the ink — and a book about him that did not end each chapter in thanks would miss the point. Read slowly, a chapter at a time, with a Bible open.

A word about his words

Chesterton died in 1936. Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925) are in the public domain, and both are in the Ochorus library. This companion quotes from them sparingly — a single sentence here and there, each checked against the library’s own text and named by book and chapter — because no summary can quite catch the sound of him, and because the quotations are meant to send the reader to the books themselves. Some of his later books, among them St Thomas Aquinas (1933) and his Autobiography (1936), remain in copyright in some countries, and nothing of them is quoted here; they are described in our own words. Readers should also be warned that a great many sayings attributed to Chesterton on the internet are not his at all. Nothing in these pages is quoted from memory or from a collection of sayings.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship. Chesterton is a delight and a guide, but there are places where evangelical readers will part company with him, and one place where every reader must be honest about him. It is kinder to name them at the start.

First, his church. Orthodoxy was written when Chesterton was a member of the Church of England, and it defends the faith of the Apostles’ Creed rather than the claims of any one church; that is why Christians of every tradition have loved it. But in 1922 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and his later books defend its distinctive claims with the same energy. He came to believe that the Church of Rome is the one true teacher of the faith, carrying an authority that evangelicals believe belongs to Scripture alone. He prayed to Mary and the saints and wrote poems in honour of the Virgin. He held the Catholic understanding of the sacraments, and he said that the chief reason he became a Catholic was to have his sins absolved by a priest. Evangelical readers will differ from him on all of these points, and the chapters that touch on them weigh them briefly and, we hope, charitably.

Second, his politics. Chesterton, with his friend Hilaire Belloc, championed an economic programme called distributism, which held that property should be spread as widely as possible, so that as many families as possible owned their own land, shop or workshop. There is much wisdom in his love of the small and the local, and much of his criticism of both big business and big government has worn well. But distributism is an economic opinion, not a Christian doctrine, and Christians who love Chesterton have held every kind of view about it. The same is true of many of his opinions on the questions of his day, from the Boer War to Irish home rule. Chapter twelve considers this.

Third, and most painful: some of what Chesterton wrote about Jews was wrong, and it has rightly been called antisemitic. During the Marconi affair of 1912 and 1913, a scandal in which government ministers were found to have traded in shares connected with a government contract, Chesterton, his brother Cecil and Belloc attacked those involved in language that made much of their being Jewish. In his journalism, and in some of his verse and fiction, Jews appear as stock figures of money and rootlessness. In The New Jerusalem (1920), an account of a journey to Palestine, he argued that the Jews were a separate nation dwelling among other nations, and proposed — insisting that he meant it seriously — that Jews holding high office in England should wear a distinctive dress so that everyone might know they were foreigners. These things are not the inventions of his critics. They are on the page, and no appeal to the habits of his time makes them right. It is also true, and fairness requires that it be said, that he condemned the Nazi persecution of the Jews early and without reserve: in 1933, when many in Britain were still inclined to excuse the new German government, he told a Jewish newspaper that he was appalled by Hitler’s atrocities, and that he and Belloc would be found defending the last Jew in Europe. Scholars still disagree about how deep the prejudice ran. When, in 2019, the Roman Catholic bishop of the diocese in which Chesterton lived and died declined to open a cause for his canonisation, he named it as one of his reasons.

This companion does not excuse those passages, and it does not draw on them. The faith Chesterton defended was first preached by Jews, about a Jewish Messiah, from Jewish Scriptures, and a Christian who speaks with contempt of the people from whom Christ came according to the flesh has forgotten something essential about his own religion. The right response is the one Scripture gives to every believer who has spoken carelessly of his neighbour: to call it sin, to learn from it, and not to repeat it.

To whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen. ROMANS 9:4–5

Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. JAMES 3:10

None of these points is raised to diminish him. They are raised because a fair companion owes them to its readers, and because Chesterton himself loved nothing better than a man who said plainly what he thought. He hated hero-worship and would have been the first to say that he was a sinner, as he was the first to say that he was a fool.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Where Chesterton is faithful — and on the great matters of the creed, the incarnation, the cross and the resurrection, he is faithful and glorious — receive it gladly. Where he goes beyond what is written, mark it and test it by Scripture. He would not have wanted you to follow him. He would have wanted you to follow Christ, and to enjoy the world He made.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. When did you last feel simple wonder at the fact that the world exists? Write down one ordinary thing you have stopped noticing, and thank God for it today.

2. Think of someone you know who regards Christianity as dull, or as a set of rules. Pray for that person by name as you read this book.

3. Decide how you will read: one chapter a day or a week, with a Bible open and a few minutes of thanksgiving after each prayer.

4. Open Orthodoxy in the Ochorus library and read its short preface and first chapter alongside this introduction.

5. Ask God to give you a mind that thinks clearly, a heart that is grateful, and a tongue that speaks of others with charity.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You made the world out of nothing, and You did not have to make it at all.

Thank You for the servants You have given Your church, who have made the old faith shine again for those who thought it dull.

As I read about one of them, keep me from admiring him and forgetting You, and keep me honest about his faults as I would want others to be honest about mine.

Give me eyes to see Your gifts, a heart to thank You for them, and a love for every neighbour that has no room for contempt, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.