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G.K.
Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense
by Dale Ahlquist
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003
183 pages
$13.95
Reviewed by Sean P. Dailey
(Click
the image to order this book from our store)
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| When
he lectures about G.K. Chesterton, American Chesterton Society president
Dale Ahlquist acknowledges what is frequently the biggest obstacle many
face when trying to read him for the first time: there’s just too much
there to know where to begin. Chesterton wrote nearly 100 books in his
lifetime and literally thousands of essays for the London newspapers.
His topics ranged from economics to theology to politics to literary criticism
to detective fiction. |
| Now,
potential readers put off by this seemingly insurmountable bulk have a
place to turn: Ahlquist’s G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense.
The book contains thirteen essays (in addition to an introduction and
a conclusion) that are distilled from Ahlquist’s EWTN series of the same
name. |
| The
brief descriptions of such Chesterton classics as Orthodoxy; Heretics;
What’s Wrong with the World; The Catholic Church and Conversion; The Thing:
Why I Am a Catholic; The Well and the Shallows; St. Francis of Assisi;
St. Thomas Aquinas; The Everlasting Man; The Outline of Sanity; The Superstition
of Divorce; Eugenics and Other Evils and of course the Father Brown
stories comes nowhere near covering all of Chesterton’s works, but there’s
enough to whet the appetite of even the most timid newcomer. |
| Ahlquist is passionate
about Chesterton, and does a fine job conveying that passion in his writing.
“G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the twentieth century,” Ahlquist
declares in the introduction. “He said something about everything, and
he said it better than anybody else. He was incredibly prolific. And incredibly
profound.” |
| And yet for all
that, he’s also incredibly ignored. My own father read “The Ballad of
the White Horse,” “Lepanto” and some Father Brown mysteries in his Catholic
prep school, but trying to find a high school or university that lists
Chesterton on its syllabus these days would take some detective work indeed.
Why is he ignored? Because the modern world prefers cheap thought to real
thinking: |
| …the
modern world finds it much more convenient to ignore him than
to risk engaging him in an argument, because to argue with Chesterton
is to lose. Chesterton argued eloquently against materialism
and scientific determinism, against relativism, agnosticism,
atheism, and other diseased philosophies that have infected
the halls of academia for more than a century. |
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| This Chesterton
did, and though in his time he was loved by many, even by his philosophical
enemies, he has never been forgiven for it by others, particularly the
liberal and cultural elites of American and Europe. This is an elite,
Stalinist to the core, that brooks no dissent. Even in Chesterton’s own
time, many who were prepared to accept his Catholic “hobby” were shocked
when he finally did cross the Tiber. “That a great man of letters should
embrace the ancient Church of Rome was something of a scandal in the literary
world and the intellectual establishment,” Ahlquist writes. “They thought
that Chesterton had suddenly become narrow, when in fact, he became universal.” |
| How universal?
The books Ahlquist has selected to describe ought to give some clue. There
are the religious works such as Orthodoxy and the books on St.
Francis and St. Thomas, but also Chesterton’s economic writings (The
Outline of Sanity) and his books on social issues (The Superstition
of Divorce and Eugenics and Other Evils). To show that all
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, Ahlquist also devotes a chapter
to Chesterton’s priest detective, Father Brown. |
| Ahlquist describes
how Father Brown came about this way. When Chesterton was a young man,
Sherlock Holmes was all the rage. The problem was, all detective fiction
then consisted of copycats trying to outdo Holmes. Chesterton’s approach
was to insist on fair play for the reader, as well as to understand “that
readers ultimately want enlightenment, not mystification, and that the
heart of every complicated detective yarn must be the discovery of a simple
truth.” |
| There was one
other element, unique to Chesterton: “While every detective must use evidence
to solve the mystery, Father Brown’s talent is not his ability to identify
the telltale cigar ash or to interpret the peculiar footprints. It is
his ability to understand the human heart.” |
| The natural yearnings
of the human heart, put there by God—and the modern world’s usurpation
of those yearnings—lie at the root of all of Chesterton’s writing. As
Ahlquist writes in the chapter on The Outline of Sanity, in Distributism,
Chesterton found an economic philosophy that operates as if people matter.
As he writes in the chapters on Chesterton’s theological books, in Christianity
and ultimately in Catholicism, Chesterton also found a religion that operates
as if people matter. |
| Nearly seven
decades after Chesterton’s death, people still don’t get it. We are, as
Ahlquist writes in the concluding chapter, still “confused about which
is the storm and which is the shipwreck.” |
| By getting to know Chesterton,
we not only will become aware of the storm above our heads, but we may
even be able to rescue the sinking ship. This book is a good introduction
to that man. It has only one flaw—a footnote on page 17 names The Man
Who Was Thursday as the book that inspired Michael Collins to lead
the movement for Irish independence. The book was The Napoleon of Notting
Hill. |
| Sean
P. Dailey is editor-in-chief of Gilbert
Magazine, a literary journal devoted to the thought
and writings of English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton.
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