GK Chesterton is one of my all-time favorite authors. I began as a child reading his Father Brown mysteries, which are such delightful and thoughtful pieces of detective drama from that genre’s golden age. Then in my 20s I picked up a book of his essays—many of them written as responses to various atheists and Marxists of the culture, who were also writing their own newspaper essays. The thought of these minds going up against one another in newsprint was and is such a source of delight. It’s probably one of the key things I think our culture is missing right now. Nobody is actually arguing against or for big ideas in a medium that the rest of the culture is actually reading.
I read one book of essays, then another. Came across one book called Heretics, then happened to read a little line in something else about his having to respond to a call-out by a fellow thinker that he only knew how to write against and not for something—hence he decided to write his Christian thesis [an explanation for his own belief, not an argument for belief, as Lewis’s Mere Christianity is], which is how I stumbled across that gem Orthodoxy, which is the book that needs to be tossed into the coffin after me, please.
Anyway, Chesterton has even replaced Lewis in my enjoyment. That’s serious!
And for all those gloating Roman Catholic friends out there . . . he wrote the finest book more than a decade before he converted to your church. ; > )
At any rate, if I had to pick a favorite chapter of any book in the world, I’d probably pick Book IV, Chapter 8 of The Two Towers, or Chapter IV of Orthodoxy, The Ethics of Elfland. If ever you are really down, and seeking meaning and purpose in the big picture of life, those are the two chapters for you!
Here’s more on Chesterton from The National Post article, from which the below is excerpted:
Born in 1874 in London, England, Chesterton grew up in a relatively secular, liberal home and enjoyed the best in British private education when British and private education still meant something. He chose not to go to university, which partly explains his visceral refusal to adopt convention and think and write within partisan definitions. He drifted into journalism but once afloat he sailed perfectly, and often against the wind.
On the fashionable nationalism of the Edwardian age, for example: “My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, my mother, drunk or sober.” On literature: “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” On being controversial: “I believe in getting into hot water, it keeps you clean.”
Books came early and frequently. Greybeards at Play in 1900, Twelve Types in 1902, a biography of Robert Browning the following year. Then in 1904 one of his finest works, a novel entitled The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Ostensibly about a London district declaring independence from Great Britain, at heart it explained Chesterton’s belief that the state was more often than not a problem rather than a solution and the greater the intervention of government the more profound the damage to the governed.
He married Frances Blogg is 1901 and they had an intensely happy, though childless, life together. She was a steadying influence on his notorious untidiness and lack of organization. “Am at Market Harborough”, he once wrote to her. “Where ought I to be.” Her reply? “Home.” At a time when H.G. Wells was celebrating infidelity and George Bernard Shaw deconstructing marriage, Chesterton insisted that family was at the epicentre of any civilized society. Family and faith.
In 1922 he became a Roman Catholic. “The fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by the one fighting form of Christianity,” he wrote. And, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
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Orthodoxy by Chesterton is available online http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/orthodoxy/orthodoxy.html
It’s also in Google Books with a disclaimer that the whole book is not available http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=f367gq0WcFcC&dq=Chesterton+Orthodoxy&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=d3ZOeDuUay&sig=FDvkTO_D2I1o_-bsdE1NHT3DxMY&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPA3,M1