Barry's Blog

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, known affectionately to his admirers simply as "GKC," would be delighted to learn that, 82 years after his death, he is still contributing to the political and theological dialogue of our day. During the recent presidential campaigns, both Mike Huckabee in his run for the Republican nomination quoted Chesterton frequently, and Obama supporters likewise see the influence of Chesterton's thought on the president-elect's worldview.

As Allen Barra wrote in an article devoted to Chesterton in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, Chesterton was born in 1874 into a middle-class London family of secular liberals. And while he embraced some of his parents' principles, he still found their liberalism to be thin soup for his soul. His religious faith was first expressed, and is best seen, in his work, Orthodoxy, first published in 1908. The book, he wrote, was not "an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly written autobiography."

In Orthodoxy he spoke of his discovery that in many ways, Christianity made the most sense of how "I could feel homesick at home." At the end of chapter five of Orthodoxy, "The Flag of the World," Chesterton observed: "Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right for feeling all things are odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things."

Orthodoxy  had a significant influence on intellectuals who became Christians in the twentieth century, and C.S. Lewis often acknowledged his indebtedness to Chesterton's writings. The reference that Chesterton makes to the oddity of our experience in this world is observable to those familiar with Lewis' classic, Mere Christianity. Lewis writes, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is not to conclude that this universe is a fraud, but to realize that I was made for another world."

Interestingly, for the last three decades of his life, Chesterton waged public "duels" with well known religious and political intellectual "heavyweights" such as Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, men who by our own day's best known "atheists," Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher, hardly deserve mention. As Barra mentions in his article, some of GKC's most fervent opponents still remained his friends for life, as in the case of Shaw, who called Chesterton's biography of him "the best work of literary art I've yet provoked."

Chesterton loved the banter with the skeptics and agnostics, remaining resolute in his faith, for after all he reasoned, "If there were no God, there would be no atheists!" One admiring young Czech writer, Franz Kafka, thought Chesterton "so happy that one might almost believe he had found God!" For indeed he believed he had, as he observed in Orthodoxy, "If a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key."