Introduction: Knight of the Holy Ghost

There are some writers who make us feel smart, and there are some writers who make us feel stupid.  Too often a writer makes us feel smart because he is stupid or makes us feel stupid because he is smart, at least smarter than we are.  Neither gives us much lasting pleasure.  But there are certain writers who make us feel smart because they tell us the truth, and we recognize it as the truth, and we wish we could have said it so well ourselves.  We are invigorated by being told what we already know, and we wish everybody else knew it, too.  In fact, we think they do know it.  They just haven't heard it yet.  The best writer is the one who gives us something that we want to give to everyone else.

Such a writer is G.K. Chesterton.  Here is the wise man described by Sirach, the man who is happy because he meditates on wisdom and makes it his dwelling and then welcomes us in.  Chesterton never used his gigantic intellect to crush others or even to take advantage of them, but only to serve something larger than his own large self.  Most of his opponents recognized this, which is why they loved him even if they did not agree with him.  Most of his friends came to take it for granted, which is why they were able to work alongside him without being over-awed by him.  But the average people who encountered him were simply astonished by him.  They found him as dazzling as a fireworks show.  His fame was widespread.  His literary and intellectual achievements were praised across the globe.  At the same time, the world did not quite know what to do with him.  He did not fit into any of their categories.  It is one of the reasons why he managed to utterly disappear in the generation after his death.

But after having been forgotten, G.K. Chesterton is now enjoying a resurgence in popularity.  Why?  Well, the obvious reason is that people are reading him again.  The rediscovery of Chesterton has less to do with his importance as a figure from history than his significance in the present.  He has proven himself to be timeless.  As his words return to print, we have discovered that he is speaking to us right now.  He is talking about all the things we face.  He describes the enemy without fear, describes the truth with precision, error with howling laughter, and the battle with an almost raucous joy.

And he's quotable.  Maybe you've heard these:

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult and left untried."

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbor and to love our enemy, generally because they are the same people."

"A dead thing can go with the stream, only a living thing can go against it."

"We don't need a Church that moves with the world; we need a Church that moves the world."

"Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly."

But here are some you probably haven't heard:

"The spirit of the age is very often the worst enemy of the age."

"Satire has weakened in our epoch for several reasons, but chiefly, I think, because the world has become too absurd to be satirized."

"Freedom of speech means practically in our modern civilization that we must only talk about unimportant things."

"The mere strain of modern life is unbearable; and in it even the things that men do desire may break down; marriage and fair ownership and worship and the mysterious worth of man."

"How can it be more important to teach a child how to avoid disease than how to value life?"

"A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality."

"There will be more, not less, respect for human rights if they can be treated as divine rights."

"Modern men are not familiar with the rational arguments for tradition, but they are familiar, almost wearily familiar, with all the rational arguments for change."

"If Christianity needs to be 'new,' it does not need to be Christian."

"The terrible danger in the heart of our Society is that the tests are giving way.  We are altering, not the evils, but the standards of good by which alone evils can be detected and defined."

"There are many critics who claim that it is morbid to confess your sins.  But the morbid thing is not to confess them.  The morbid thing is to conceal your sins and let them eat away at your soul, which is exactly the state of most people in today's highly civilized communities."

I could go on and on.  I often do.  Quoting Chesterton is delicious.  His words provide exquisite flavor and enormous satisfaction.  But what do we especially notice in the above quotations besides how clearly and crisply the truth bursts out of them?  They are utterly timely.  They describe today.  Yet they were written a hundred years ago.

So, who is the man who said these things?  All of Chesterton's biographies, especially this brief one, suffer from the same weakness.  They cannot capture him.  He always manages to escape.  We learn of the events of his life, the characters who populated it, his fame, his travels, his conversion.  We take in amusing stories of his adventures in pubs or on sidewalks or at after-dinner speeches, and we get a taste of the man, a glimpse, and then he's gone.  We never really get to know him as he passes by us….

The world we live in is a mess.  It does no good to deny it.  And it does no good to deny that G. K. Chesterton prophetically described the mess we are in.  But he also described why it has happened, and he proposed solutions for cleaning it up.  When a prophet has been proved right in his predictions, it is worthwhile to look at his precepts.  It is certainly worthwhile to get to know G. K. Chesterton.  And so, please allow me to introduce you to a friend of mine.  But all I can do is introduce you.  You'll have to get to know him yourself.