Chesterton’s Lessons for Us Today

Christopher Altieri suggests that GK Chesterton’s ability to maintain friendship with those he disagreed with is a good example for our polarised world.

Who was Gilbert Keith Chesterton, born 150 years ago on May 29 in England? Prophet? Philosopher? Poet? Gadfly? Sage? Curmudgeon? People have called Chesterton all of those things, but I suspect he’d chuckle at most of them. GK Chesterton was a journalist.

Sure, Chesterton wrote serious literary criticism — his biographer, the late Ian Ker (who also wrote the definitive biography of St John Henry Newman), convincingly argued that in the early 20th century Chesterton was almost single-handedly responsible for the recovery of Charles Dickens as a great author. Sure, Chesterton wrote plays, novels, short stories and even poetry, and sure, much of his literary output was very good. But above all, he was a journalist.

Chesterton wrote thousands of columns for newspapers and magazines, many of them on the hot-button issues of his day, in which he not only championed common sense but also demonstrated it in practice.

You’ve probably quoted GK Chesterton or heard him quoted, even if you’ve never heard his name. Chances are good that you have come across his most famous fictional creation, the sleuth-sage Father Brown, in one of his many film and television incarnations. There’s one going presently on the BBC, starring Mark Williams — Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter films — as the crime-solving Catholic priest.

Even if you know nothing about him, you’ve felt Chesterton’s influence. When Chesterton exchanged time for eternity on June 14, 1936, at the age of 62, The Southern Cross remembered him as “a veritable giant in the world of letters” and “one of the most loveable personalities of our time”.

Chesterton was a giant, figuratively and literally — he stood 1,93m and weighed 130kg by middle age. Every Catholic writer somehow stands in his shadow. Chesterton’s imitators are legion and have been since the writer trod the earth. Who wouldn’t love to be the next Chesterton?

The thing that made Chesterton loveable, to intimates and readers alike, was his bottomless capacity for friendship. One of Chesterton’s inveterate interlocutors was none other than George Bernard Shaw — undoubtedly a great playwright and almost preternaturally powerful thinker whose pagan worldview clashed mightily with Chesterton’s Christian philosophy.

Chesterton and Shaw debated in person and in print over several decades. These were not men who disagreed lightly and transiently, nor over rifling matters. Shaw was an apologist for the eugenics movement — as were many enlightened men of letters and science of his time — while Chesterton was a Christian and appalled by the idea that the human gene pool might be altered by excluding individuals and groups deemed inferior.

And yet he entertained no antagonism towards Shaw. “I can testify,” Chesterton wrote in 1935, “that I have never read a reply by Bernard Shaw that did not leave me in a better temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of an inexhaustible fountain of fair-mindedness and intellectual geniality.”

Friendship in disagreement

Chesterton had an ability to cultivate genuine friendship with such fellows as Shaw. I genuinely wonder whether in our polarised world today, such public friendships of two fellows of similar public stature so genuinely and fondly admiring of one another across the lines of philosophy and ideology, wouldn’t give us grounds for moral suspicion rather than admiration. That the matter is open to question is telling — not flattering — of us; but in fairness, it was something of an oddity even in Chesterton’s and Shaw’s own day. Such friendships are unusual. We need more of them. We will not get them unless we cultivate in ourselves and each other the capacity for them.

That is one potent reason for celebrating GK Chesterton on the 150th anniversary of his birth this year, and a tonic reminder of what humanity can do for good when we remember to practise the art of being human.

“If a thing is worth doing,” Chesterton famously quipped in defence of the amateur against the professionalisation of everything, “it is worth doing badly.” Friendship is one of those things, and we are running out of time. Recovering our capacity for friendship — the kind that makes fellows of those who see things very differently — may not save us or our civilisation, but it is essential to the work of getting our selves and societies worth saving.

Humanity is one of those things to which we must bend ourselves if we would have a hope of standing up straight. We may die trying. We will die in any case.

Chesterton may or may not have actually answered a query from The Times of London, “What’s wrong with the world?” with the pithy and pointed reply:

Dear Sir,

I am.

Yours, GKC

A Catholic and catholic journalist

Chesterton rubbed elbows and butted heads with other notables, including author HG Wells and philosopher Bertrand Russell. His debate with the US lawyer-activist Clarence Darrow, who defended John Scopes in the infamous “monkey trial” over the teaching of evolution in public schools, concerned the resolution: “Will the world return to religion?”

No transcript of the debate is extant, if ever any was made, but the Society for Gilbert Keith Chesterton has collected newspaper reports that give the day entirely to Chesterton. The Society also reports some lines Darrow wrote around the time of Chesterton’s passing: “I enjoyed my debates with him, and found him a man of culture and fine sensibilities. If he and I had lived where we could have become better acquainted, eventually we would have ceased to debate, I firmly believe.” Perhaps. I wager they would have been friends.

As a journalist I appreciate Chesterton. There was a journalist who was both Catholic and catholic. Chesterton talked with everyone. He did not write for his crowd but deliberately for those who saw it differently (whatever “it” was or may have been). Chesterton did not compromise or otherwise dilute his convictions, but he always was at pains to see whatever matter was before him all the way round.

“It is not bigotry to be certain we are right,” Chesterton wrote in his 1926 essay “The Obvious Blunders” (in The Catholic Church and Conversion), “but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”

The journalist calls it as he or she sees it, and takes the hits as they come. That’s what Chesterton did, day-in and day-out, for decades, almost until the very day he died.

Chesterton opposed the Second Boer War when it was very popular at home in England, and well before he had established himself. He is frequently counted among the “Little Englanders” and was generally opposed to imperialism. Not all he wrote has aged well. His writing blithely deployed dictions regarding race that we would rightly find appalling today, though scholars agree that his thinking on race was ahead of its time.

Chesterton’s private letters and public expressions both contain statements that are frankly anti-Semitic. Chesterton’s devotees argue forcefully and cogently for a reading that would at least contextualise if not exonerate him, but Chesterton’s anti-Semitism was palpable and pronounced enough to be a reason for the suspension of his sainthood cause in 2019.

“There is a case for telling the truth,” wrote Chesterton in the Illustrated London News, “there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defence for the man who tells the scandal but does not tell the truth.” Now, there’s a quote for all of us, and especially for the Church leaders of our day, high and low.

Christopher Altieri is a Catholic journalist based in the US and Italy who specialises in Vatican issues.

Published in the May 2024 issue of The Southern Cross magazine