![]() The secret to sanity, he believed, was a life painted rich by imagination and curiosity. It is thus no small wonder that Chesterton had the ability to simultaneously capture the head and the heart of so many of his readers. His career in journalism would eventually take off after that, but he remained an artist at heart. So whether or not you want to call Chesterton a philosopher, you can’t help but call him a “lover of wisdom.”Īfter finishing his education as a youngster, Chesterton attended art school. He reverses our habit of standing on our head.” In other words, Chesterton is a sort of doctor of sanity whose writing helps others to live in the real world. ![]() But in the words of Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft, “He was a genius.” Kreeft marvels at Chesterton’s therapeutic effect on his readers’ common sense: “He sees things as they are. He was not in the strict and academic sense a philosopher or theologian. The moment he tries to be fair to it he begins to be fond of it.”Ĭhesterton did not have a graduate degree. The moment he ceases to shout it down he begins to listen to it with pleasure. The moment a man ceases to pull against it he feels a tug towards it. “It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. And all the while Mother Church, like the father of the prodigal son, waited patiently for my return home.Ĭhesterton, who experienced his own bout of agnosticism, reflected in The Catholic Church and Conversion: Fairness was the key that unlocked my mind and imagination to the piercing truths of Christianity. As a fallen-away Catholic, absence made my heart grow firmer-indeed harder-toward the Church but in the long run, the cliché did ring true and absence did make the heart grow fonder. I can relate to this roundabout way of discovering where the pillar of truth lies, this sense of leaving church in order to rediscover the Church. It turns out he needed to leave home in order to discover it-or rediscover it-and it is precisely this paradox that Chesterton sets up to be his starting point in his classic work Orthodoxy. Indeed, orthodoxy or “right doctrine” turned out to be, unexpectedly, the very religion he had rejected at the start. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it.” “I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. “When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom,” he wrote. He was after the “master key” of philosophies, for he was certain no one had yet found it.Įventually, he knitted together a philosophy that appeared to be wholly true and sane and sensible, only to discover that his discovered philosophy of sanity was, in fact, not his. In the beginning, Chesterton rejected Christianity for the sake of finding the truth, the one blanket philosophy that could explain everything as everything is, because he did not believe Christianity or any other modern worldview to be completely it. ![]() He was interested in living truths no matter how hard-and that is exactly what he did. He wasn’t interested in running away from hard truths. Nor was he interested in merely finding the truth. This undoubtedly is true for many in our modern era of rampant religious indifference.īut one exception is Chesterton himself. Chesterton wrote that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting rather, it has been found difficult and left untried. Home › Articles › Institute Fellows › What Did Chesterton See in the Church? Get the Ultimate Introduction to Philosophy “Ask Bishop Barron” on the WOF Show Podcast.WOF 383: What Christianity Brings to the Public Conversation.Proportionalism: An Old But Stubborn Foe.
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