Chesterton is well known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and for his reasoned apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, his "friendly enemy", said of him, "He was a man of colossal genius."Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin.
Chesterton is an easy writer to love—a brilliant sentence-maker, a humorist, a journalist of endless appetite and invention. His aphorisms alone are worth the price of admission, better than any but Wilde’s. Even his standard-issue zingers (1) are first-class—“Americans are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices”. (1) US, slang (pointed witty remark): ocurrencia.
The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges. It is also, along with Chesterton’s “The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the nearest thing that this masterly writer wrote to a masterpiece.
Chesterton liked to pair himself, congenially, with Shaw, as his opposite, and he was right to do so, for they were the two most perceptive critics of capitalism in their decade. The chief bourgeois vices are hypocrisy and homogenization.
(see Chesterton's alarm at the homogenizing tendency of globalization).
Mercantile capitalist societies profess values that their own appetites destroy; calls for public morality come from the same people who use prostitutes. Meanwhile, the workings of capital turn the local artisan into a maker of mass-produced objects and every high street into an identical strip mall. Shaw is the great critic of the hypocrisy of bourgeois society—its inconsistencies and absurdities, the way it robs the poor and then demands that they be “deserving.” Chesterton is the great critic of its homogenization, the levelling of difference in the pursuit of cash. He is the grandfather of Slow Food, of local eating, of real ale, the first strong mind that saw something evil in the levelling of little pleasures.
The really startling thing in the book is Chesterton’s imagining of the anarchists as philosopher-demons.
Chesterton thinks the anarchist’s hatred of bourgeois materialism is so obviously attractive, comes so near to the divine, that it is the truest evil. Only an act of strong will can resist it.
The trouble for those of us who love Chesterton’s writing is that the anti-Semitism is not incidental:
Chesterton tries to defend himself by explaining what it is that makes people naturally mistrust Jews. All schoolboys recognized Jews as Jews, he says, and when they did so “what they saw was not Semites or Schismatics or capitalists or revolutionists, but foreigners, only foreigners that were not called foreigners.” Even a seemingly assimilated Jew, in Chesterton’s world, remains a foreigner. No one born a Jew can become a good Englishman: if England had sunk into the Atlantic, he says, Disraeli would have run off to America. The more he tries to excuse himself, the worse it gets. In his autobiography, he writes of how he appreciates that “one of the great Jewish virtues is gratitude,” and explains that he knows this because as a kid at school “I was criticized in early days for quixotry and priggishness in protecting Jews; and I remember once extricating a strange swarthy little creature with a hooked nose from being bullied, or rather being teased.”
Chesterton’s philosophy
If one were to capture G.K. Chesterton’s philosophy to just a few words, it could be done in this sentence: Free will exists. Almost everything else that he wrote followed from this belief, including his objection to fatalism and determinism in all their forms.
G.K. Chesterton rejected optimism and pessimism because he found both to be expressions of a fatalistic approach to life, which he believed was a story to be lived rather than a plan to be unfolded.
Optimism, Chesterton contended, encouraged a kind
of dangerous complacency. Why bother working toward some good end or
goal when at base one believes that everything is going to turn out fine
anyway? And pessimism? In its own perverse way, Chesterton thought it
encouraged a kind of complacency all its own. Why bother trying to stop
some bad end or some evil act when everything is going to turn out
badly anyway?
However, Chesterton did think there was one
telling difference between optimists and pessimists. The optimist
thought everything was good about the world—except the pessimist; the
pessimist thought everything was bad about the world—except himself.
On religion:
One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.
It is the test of a good religion whether (or not) you can joke about it (or not).
Religious freedom / liberty is / might be supposed to mean that we are / everybody is free to discuss (our) religion. In practice, (however), it means that we are barely / hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
On Joking About Religion:
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it. – All Things Considered.
On Being a Christian:
All Things Considered, just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a / your garage makes you a car.
On God:
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free.
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
On love:
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
To love means loving the unlovable. Faith means believing the unbelievable.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable. (adorable, affable)
On money:
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
On life:
When it comes to living life / life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
On Imagination:
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. – Orthodoxy
On politics:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
On Gratitude:
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
On Picking Sides:
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
On The Value of Mystery:
As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. – Orthodoxy
On Women And Intuition:
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. – The Everlasting Man (What, if anything, is it that makes the human uniquely human?)
On Courage:
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die. (willingness; inclination)
On Being Humbled by Relgion:
It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary. – Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
On Sin:
Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. – Orthodoxy
On Relativity:
The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
On Right:
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. A Short History of England, (1917)
On Drinking:
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
On Sensationalism:
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
On other topics:
Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
We are perishing for want / lack of wonder, not for want / lack of wonders. (amazements, (astonishments): Perecemos por falta de asombro, no por falta de milagros.
The world will never lack for (1) / starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder. * lack of appetite, discipline, educaction, interest, respect, preparation, feelings, self-confidence, enthusiasm, integrity ...
(1) lack for: to lack something. We don't lack for new ideas. We lack for nothing, thank you. To be in need of something or someone. Used chiefly in the negative: She is very popular and does not lack for friends. Because he's rich, he doesn't lack for luxuries.
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