Tolle Lege

This week I wanted to talk about my favorite Christian thinker, following up on Charlie’s post last week. Until my freshman year of high school, basically the only books I read were fantasy, science fiction, and spy/detective novels. But in high school, I discovered G.K. Chesterton, not knowing when I did that he would change my life. Chesterton was the first person I discovered who successfully treated Christianity as a reasonable and credible worldview. The insights contained in Orthodoxy- the first Chesterton book I read- were fresh and startling, and greatly increased my intellectual appreciation of Christianity. He convinced me that there was a good case to be made for the faith.

The most noticeable thing about Chesterton, though, isn’t his ability to draw out the rationality of the Christian faith. There are, after all, any number of people who can accomplish that project. It is instead Chesterton’s approach to the faith that attracted and continues to attract me. Chesterton’s posture towards Christianity was not primarily one of a rationally convinced thinker. Though he was committed to Christianity’s truth, it was not purely logical considerations that defined his faith. Instead, Chesterton’s writings conveyed an intense joy, gratitude, and peace. His books literally burst with life. The novelist and atheist Franz Kafka once said about Chesterton after reading only one of his novels, that, “He is so happy! I can almost believe that he has found God.” Indeed Chesterton himself said that “Joy…is the gigantic secret of the Christian,” and he seemed fully to grasp the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John that, “I came that they might have life and have it to the full.”

In the atmosphere of contemporary apologetics and atheist polemics, in which the conversations about God can so easily become sterile and repetitive, and devolve into a dull exchange of talking points, the works of Chesterton are a necessary corrective. His works, more than anybody else I have read, except perhaps those of his friend Hilaire Belloc, convey what it means to live an authentic Christian life. They show a man who exuded the wonder and the awe and the joy and the love proper to a Christian. He was trained as a poet, not as a logician, which goes a long way to explaining his writing style. But it also helps to account for the incredible ability his works have to convey emotion. I think now more than ever we need to read people like Chesterton, who remind us that we have a heart as well as a brain, and that Christianity is concerned with the whole person.

Today, Christianity is too often seen as something life denying. To read Chesterton is be to cured of this illusion. St. Augustine said of Christians that, “We are Resurrection people,” and Chesterton lived that truth of that statement. He said, “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” Chesterton teaches us to be interested in everything- in life, in love, in beauty and joy, and most of all, in God. He forces us to reawake to the glory of this world. I have one piece of advice about reading Chesterton. Most people start with Orthodoxy or The Everlasting Man (called by C.S. Lewis “the best popular apologetic I know”), his two famous apologetics works. But I would recommend that somebody looking at Chesterton for the first time start instead with his novel Manalive. Among his works I have read, it is the best at demonstrating Chesterton’s essential approach to life and faith. Read it- but only if you are prepared to encounter someone who was, in my opinion, of the most fully alive men who ever walked this earth.