Chesterton the Brilliant

“The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is this: that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.”

—G.K. Chesterton

A Hillsdale College history professor recently posted a challenge on social media: “Why do people take Chesterton seriously as a thinker? Because he wasn’t.” His challenge was accepted immediately with scores of responses. Most of them defended Chesterton, but there were several who agreed with the premise that the great British writer was intellectually shallow: “He was a blowhard if ever there was one”; “Aside from a nugget here and there, he’s wildly overrated”; “I’m so glad to hear someone else say this!”

This charge has been floating around for decades, even before Chesterton’s death in 1936. In these very pages, toward the end of the last century—back when Crisis came in the mail each month and didn’t have a website—another history professor wrote an essay casually dismissing G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc as “boozy apologists.” “I certainly do not deny that what these authors have to say is often true and good,” wrote Dr. James Hitchcock of St. Louis University. “But art is long, life short, and I long ago decided that I should study other things.”

For Hitchcock, perhaps, it was simply a matter of taste. To me, the response to the new accusation of Chesterton as a non-thinker is obvious. It’s absurdly wrong and perhaps based more on bias than reason. 

After all, Chesterton’s thin book on St. Thomas Aquinas has been praised by some of the top Thomists of the 20th century, with Etienne Gilson remarking: “I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement.” I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement.Tweet This

Another great mind with an opinion about Chesterton’s smarts was Msgr. Ronald A. Knox, whom no thinking person can claim to be an intellectual slouch; he won numerous accolades in an exemplary Eton and Oxford education. 

In a 1941 essay, Knox found Chesterton to be “intellectually great,” as he put it, in three ways. As an artist viewing things, his mind “seized instinctively on the essences of them.” Secondly, as a writer across genres: for Chesterton, “always the luminous idea stood out—the idea we had never seen, looking at the facts a thousand times, because it was so simple.”

Most important, perhaps: 

I call that man intellectually great, who sees the whole of life as a coherent system; who can touch on any theme, and illuminate it, and always in a way that is related to the rest of his thought, so that you say “Nobody but he would have written that.” Chesterton was such a man.

Given all this, I would argue that the best word for Chesterton is brilliant, in the fullest sense of the term. By this I mean that he was, to borrow from the Oxford English Dictionary, “brightly shining, glittering, sparkling, lustrous.” At the same time, other definitions offered by the OED are “striking the imagination” and “distinguished by talent and cleverness.” All these apply to Chesterton, who once said that “the deepest of all desires for knowledge is the desire to know what the world is for and what we are for.” 

A person cannot honestly read works like The Everlasting Man, Orthodoxy, or his short appreciations of Aquinas and Francis of Assisi and claim he was not a serious thinker. Even his entertainments, like The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, or the many Father Brown mysteries show a mind who could use entertainment to advance deeper considerations about life and our place in the world.

There is one thing Chesterton was not, and perhaps that grates on some of his critics. He was not an academic. He did not haunt the halls of Oxford or Cambridge, but rather, came from art school, an education fueled by his early gifts and interests, and that gave him clear vision of the deep-down things, as Knox noted. He was a writer and journalist, not a professor, with over 100 books and thousands of essays to his credit. Some may have been groaners, but the backbone of Chesterton’s work was great and helped many see the truth—including C.S. Lewis, who credited The Everlasting Man for his intellectual baptism. 

Yet, one can be left wondering to what extent much of the Chesterton hate over the years—and I certainly don’t apply this motive to Dr. Hitchcock or even the Hillsdale professor, perhaps—is still based on that singular event in 1922, Chesterton’s entry into the Catholic Church. As much as the Catholic situation improved in England by that time, Catholics were still on the outs. 

Conversion for those like Robert Hugh Benson (1903), Ronald Knox (1917), Evelyn Waugh (1930), or Chesterton meant being privately ghosted and publicly attacked by those who were once friends. And it is something we still see to this very day when prominent influencers swim the Tiber. The Vanity Fair website published a feature earlier this month titled “Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex,” which makes one wonder why the Catholic Left isn’t out converting its own favorite celebrities.

Real Catholics are weird, to borrow a word much in vogue these days, and the Church is routinely attacked not simply for being weird but unscientific and unreasonable. Chesterton, of course, is the sort of person who would roll with the charge of weirdness and make light of it—something that perhaps would embarrass others. “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

While the world rejects the idea there is a “whole truth of things,” our brilliant Chesterton saw that this must be the case—and he grasped that truth far better than most self-proclaimed “thinkers” today.

K.E. Colombini writes from St. Louis. His work has been published in Crisis, First Things, Front Porch Republic, National Catholic Register, Homiletic and Pastoral Review and elsewhere.