Spiritual Electric Shock Therapy
Back in college, I started, along with a few of my friends, an informal group devoted to reading the work of G. K. Chesterton. It went about as you might imagine: After each meeting, I would assign a chapter for the members to read, and exactly one month later, all of us would start reading the chapter about the time the meeting was supposed to start. Once the conversation had begun, it often amounted to an extended exercise in who could come up with the most creative way of using a bit of Chestertonian wit to springboard into the realm of one’s preexisting ideas–or else, a filibuster on one’s love life. Thinly-veiled admissions of procrastination along the lines of “You know, the first sentence of this chapter really got me thinking about…” were not altogether uncommon, nor was the even more ingenious and daring, “Oddly enough, that was the same part I underlined.”
Nevertheless, I do remember one very important and troubling question that one of my colleagues asked while the rest of us were busy avoiding a real discussion of the first chapter of Chesterton’s most famous work, Orthodoxy. In that chapter, Chesterton lays out what he plans to prove and what he does not plan to prove in what would become a touchstone work of Christian apologetics for the 20th century. Chesterton planned to prove that Christian theology is the best answer to the human riddle, to the paradoxical needs of the human heart, which wants at the same time to be astonished by the world and at home in it.1 What he did not plan to prove, however, was the human riddle. He writes: “The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is the desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired.”2
Now, this supposed common ground is precisely what my friend questioned. “Looking around,” he began, “do we actually think that western man wants the romantic, adventurous life that Chesterton is always talking about?” All of us, a bit disturbed by our friend’s attention to the empirical, took a glance at our surroundings, which happened to be the brightly lit interior of a Hurts Donuts. There was no denying the power of his objection. Each of us were forced to concede, before consoling ourselves with one of the establishment's glazed delicacies, that western man seems bored–that is, he seems more interested in material pleasures than spiritual and intellectual nourishment, more interested in comfort than Chestertonian cosmic courage. Needless to say, I was troubled, both spiritually and physically, driving home that night.
I think, however, that I have finally come up with the crushing reply I would deliver to my friend if I could go back: I would simply hold up Chesterton’s book and ask why we were all there to read it instead of something else. All of us were already Christians–we weren’t exactly reading Chesterton for the apologetics. We could go to William Lane Craig or Alvin Plantinga for that, but none of us had done so, and none of us have done so ten years later. No, we were there to reawaken ourselves to the Chestertonian way of seeing life, which he insisted depended on Christian belief. We were there for his insistence that life is wonderful precisely because there is so much at stake in it. In other words, we were there for the romance–to be reminded that life is “picturesque and full of poetical curiosity.”
What I’ve come to understand over the last decade is that my ring of friends was not alone in feeling drawn to Chesterton’s work. Despite all that we know about the 21st century’s spiritual decadence, the influence and popularity of this late-Victorian Catholic convert is increasing by the day. Yet what I had failed to consider, at least until very recently, is why this is so–exactly why people like me have been so drawn to the work of Chesterton in this particular moment and milieu. It’s my hope that by inspecting a few of Chesterton’s core convictions we can begin to uncover what makes his spiritual vision so gripping to a 21st century American audience–and therefore, what we, as Christian writers, have to learn from him.
The first thing to understand about Chesterton is that he believed in beliefs. As he admits in his book Heretics, he counts himself among the unfashionable few “who think that the practical and important thing about a man is still his philosophy on life.”3 He thought that the real “question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.” The most important thing about a man was not his socio-economic status, his nationality, his race, his family-of-origin. Sure, all of these environmental factors would make a significant impact on the philosophy a person ultimately adopts, but the philosophy is what we must seek to understand about a man. However, when it came to the popular turn-of-the-century philosophies, Chesterton read far and wide, and ultimately came to the conclusion that they were all bunk. None of them were satisfactory, either because they claimed to know the truth and failed to explain reality, or they explained away reality by claiming we could never know what was true. Materialists explained everything in terms of matter and seemed to leave everything that matters out. Nitzscheans worshipped the will and suddenly nothing was worth doing anymore. Progressives claimed that reality consisted of pure change, with the result that now nothing seemed worth changing. In each of these cases, what we have is an anti-philosophy, which claims that there is no order in reality to be explained, or a philosophy that is perfectly coherent and claims to explain everything while failing in the most important area: in providing an explanation for why reality is worth explaining at all.
At many points, Chesterton’s critique of these philosophies sounds like that which we might expect from a pragmatist: These philosophies must be rejected because they wouldn’t work in practice. Believing as he did that the philosophy of a man is really the most important thing about him, Chesterton knew that these failed philosophies would affect things, but not in a good way. They were powerful, but they wouldn’t work for anyone. However, Chesterton was not a pragmatist because he understood that pragmatism itself could never work. Chesterton knew, more at the level of instinct than rational argument, that man needs something more than a vague notion of “a healthy psychology” to get him out of bed in the morning. A healthy psychology simply isn’t reason enough for a human being to go on doing this difficult thing we call living.
But what is good enough for a human being? Well, as I’ve already suggested, Chesterton had his ideas about that. Chesterton believed that we human beings don’t just want to be healthy-minded; we want to be heroic. We don’t want a balanced diet; we want both fast and feast. We don’t want the golden mean; we want love and anger, patriotism and revolution, comedy and tragedy–we want both extremes, all the way, all at once. And Chesterton came to understand that the only way we can hold these extremes together is to allow for genuine transcendence. What we need to believe is that our deepest yearnings for meaning and morality actually correspond to the way reality is–to the way God made the world. In a word, we need to believe that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied.
Of course, we probably all know that Chesterton came to believe that Christianity alone answered the “double need” of the human heart. Chesterton set out to found his own philosophy, one that would provide the human person with reason to change the world out of love for the world, but he found the Christian religion instead.4 In the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption, Chesterton found ample reason to love the world, since a good God made the world and called it good, and was even willing to die to save it. Yet he also found that Christianity provided more than enough reason to wage war on evil, because we were the reason for the pain and wickedness and death in the world, and Jesus had left it to us to be soldiers of Christ until He brought reinforcements at His second coming. For Chesterton, the ability of Christianity to provide a satisfying answer to the riddle of the human heart suggested its absolute truth, and he took the leap of faith.5
It is my belief that Chesterton’s insistence on the supreme importance of right belief provides the key to understanding Chesterton’s unwieldy literary style and output–as well as his contemporary importance to us as writers and readers. Chesterton’s novels are lopsided, slapstick affairs; his poems are anything but polished; even his most extensive arguments, such as those laid out in Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, are offered in a form more like a collection of essays than a comprehensive or systematic treatment of a subject. Similarly, his prose style is meandering, verbose, and repetitive. I can only imagine that many of his readers would sympathize with the opinion of one of my undergraduate professors, who, upon hearing one of my extravagant panegyrics to Chesterton, merely mumbled that he would have thought more of Chesterton if Chesterton had ever gotten around to making his point.
Yet I think Chesterton’s rhetorical faults (or idiosyncrasies, if we want to be generous) reveal what it is we must learn from him. As I suggested before, Chesterton became convinced that Christianity answered the double need of the human heart–namely, to hate what is evil and love what is true, good, and beautiful. What is fascinating, though, is that Chesterton, for all of his belief in the power of philosophy, didn’t seem too intent upon providing a systematic treatment of his own philosophy. In fact, it would almost seem that he didn’t just fail to produce a traditional magnum opus, but he positively intended not to. At the beginning of Orthodoxy, Chesterton writes: “I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state a philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.”6 This description of his approach to Orthodoxy serves as a perfect summary of his approach to writing in general, from the beginning to the end of his career. It wouldn’t seem too off the mark, then, to say that Chesterton did not supply a systematic treatment of his philosophy because St. Thomas Aquinas had already done the job a few centuries before. A new philosophy was not what was needed, but a new kind of appeal, or approach, to an old philosophy–an appeal accounting for modern conditions and suited to modern souls.
Perhaps the thing that Chesterton understood better than any other writer of his time is that, in the modern context, a Christian writer must not only convince his reader of the answer to the riddle of his heart, but he must also convince him of the riddle itself. My friend in the Hurts Donuts was right: The people of our day, by and large, don’t seem overly keen on romantic adventure, let alone Christian faith. They do not seem to notice that there is a war waging within them between darkness and light, evil and good, sadness and joy. They seem, more often than not, to be some combination of apathetic, tired, and sad. But here’s the thing: I firmly believe that the people of Chesterton’s day were similarly disaffected, yet Chesterton only took that as his point of departure, his marching orders. Recognizing that the problem of modern society is a problem of wrong belief, but also that “a man cannot think himself out of mental evil,” Chesterton did not so much seek to offer airtight rational arguments for the Christian faith as he sought out images and stories and aphorisms that could cut through layers of accumulated despair and reach the vital core of the modern man–that is, his will. In all his works, but especially in his literature, Chesterton was seeking to wake up the modern man to his destiny, which was to love what is good and hate what is evil with all the latent passion in his decadent soul.
In what may be my favorite novel by Chesterton, Manalive, the protagonist Innocent Smith is held on trial for holding an acquaintance at gunpoint. His explanation? “I am going to hold a pistol to the head of Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–but to bring him to life.” Clearly, for the same reason that Innocent Smith held a pistol to the head of his pessimistic colleagues, Chesterton wrote his books. He wanted to awaken the modern man to the confounding but ultimately miraculous mystery of life, using any verbal antics necessary–and often antics nearly as violent and absurd as those of Innocent Smith. Yet I think there may be one further secret to the work of Chesterton that the character of Innocent Smith reveals. Late in the novel, one character says of Smith: “His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world.” What becomes clear throughout the novel is that, all his life, Innocent had been seeking to jolt himself awake in much the same way that he was now seeking to awaken his acquaintances with the muzzle of a pistol. From this, one can’t help but wonder if Chesterton, in all of his searching for striking images and memorable aphorisms, was really trying to jolt himself awake as much as he was trying to awaken his readership. One gets the idea that Chesterton’s practice of writing was really an extended practice in some sort of self-inflicted spiritual electric-shock-therapy. I wonder if we could all benefit from approaching our writing this way.
