On the 150th Anniversary of His Birth: A Celebration of G. K. Chesterton
At the end of last month, on May 29, lovers of literature celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of G. K. Chesterton, one of the greatest and most influential writers of the twentieth century. It is, however, not merely those who love literature who were celebrating the life and legacy of Chesterton, but also those who value the traditional family and Christian morality, as well as those seeking just solutions to the errors and horrors of our modern age and the monsters that modernity and postmodernity have constructed.
G. K. Chesterton was born in 1874 and burst onto the literary scene in 1900 as a popular newspaper columnist and essayist. His popularity was due to his wit and wisdom, and to the pyrotechnic brilliance of his paradoxical approach to understanding the world in which we live. A champion of localism and an opponent of what would now be called globalism, Chesterton advocated a socially just solution to economic and social problems rooted in a Christian understanding of humanity and human society. In books, such as The Outline of Sanity and What’s Wrong with the World, he opposed the dehumanizing influence of both Mammon and Marx, which were political and economic manifestations of greed and envy. Instead, he called for a society rooted in the inviolable sanctity of the family, which was the bedrock upon which any healthy socially just order must be founded. He saw an economy in which many small businesses thrived as being healthier than an economy in which a few huge corporations prevailed, forcing smaller competitors out of business. He exposed the fallacy of socialist solutions to the injustices of society, arguing that socialism kept families and people in bondage by replacing the power of big business with the power of big government. The injustice caused by too much of the economy being owned and controlled by too few big businessmen was not solved by putting the whole economy in the hands of a huge centralized and centralist state. The solution was to find ways to promote the flourishing of many small businesses.
Furthermore, in works such as Eugenics and Other Evils, Chesterton prophesied the culture of death, which would lead to the genocide of the Nazis and the infanticide of our own culture’s support for abortion on demand. He also foresaw how a tolerance of eugenics would begin with benign-seeming euthanasia but would lead to the systemic culling of the old and the unfit.
Although Chesterton’s political philosophy remains relevant and retains its potential to inspire today’s policy makers, he was much more than merely a political philosopher. As a novelist, he delved into the deepest mysteries of the meaning of life. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill he supported the rights of local communities to defend themselves from the encroachments of big government, echoing in fiction what he was advocating in his non-fictional works. In The Man Who was Thursday he explored the noble quest of philosophy to discover the nature of truth but also the limits of human reason to attain such truth without the assistance of divine revelation. In essence, this classic novel illustrates how philosophy needs theology to unravel the meaning and mystery of life and the meaning and mystery of suffering. In Manalive, Chesterton takes the reader on a metaphysical romp in which we discover that being fully alive requires humility, gratitude and wonder, without which we cannot be moved to the contemplation necessary for the dilation of the human mind and soul into the fullness of living and lived reality.
As a poet, Chesterton is responsible for some of the finest verse of the twentieth century. His long epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, eulogized King Alfred the Great’s quest to save Christian England from being overrun by the paganism of the Vikings and Danes. His historical poem “Lepanto” celebrates the victory of the small Christian fleet against the Turkish Armada seeking to conquer Europe in the sixteenth century. His charming short verse, “The Donkey”, is an exultation of the small and the humble in its praise of the less than lordly beast of burden that carried Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
In addition to his novels, poetry and works of political philosophy, Chesterton was one of the finest essayists in a period that might be considered a golden age of the essay. He wrote biographies, history books and works of Christian apologetics. He was an indefatigable and indomitable defender of all things good, true and beautiful. He was a Christian warrior in the culture wars, a knight of the Holy Ghost, as the poet Walter de la Mare dubbed him. He was a giant. He was a genius. He is worth celebrating.
A native of England, Joseph Pearce is the internationally acclaimed author of many books.
Related Essays