A many-faceted jewel

He died 16 days after his 60th birthday; of this latter date he had written, characteristically, "Bowing down in blind credulity... superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on May, 29, 1874." He died, and one wonders whether it registered at the time - probably not - he was sliding in and out of consciousness, 400 years after the Defender of the Faith formally turned against that faith.

The 20th century in Britain was to witness the equivalent of a second Oxford Movement. Converts to the Catholic Church included Chesterton himself, of course, Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn, Oscar Wilde - on his death bed - Christopher Dawson, C.S. Lewis, Alec Guinness, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, to name a few. Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, can provide the names of a further 130 men and women who owe their reception into the Catholic Church to the man whose own conversion caused Shaw to send him a swift admonitory note: "My dear G.K.C., This is going too far."

For Chesterton, we are told by one of his biographers, Joseph Pearce, the occasion inspired one of his best sonnets:

"The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free;
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live."

One of the most brilliant minds of his generation, he wrote his famous books, The Romance of Orthodoxy, in response to a challenge by a G.S. Street. All very well to write about heretics and get them to affirm their cosmic theory; Mr Street would worry about his philosophy when Mr Chesterton 'has given us a bit of his.' This was, Chesterton remarks in Orthodoxy, "an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation."

He reached Rome 14 years before he was formally received. "I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me."

Chesterton is a many-faceted jewel. This explains the remarkable renaissance his works are currently enjoying, for the simple reason that he expressed the truth in a way that is as fresh today as it was when he first uttered, or wrote it. He has something to say to everyone: from the atheist to the believer, the economist to the philosopher, the newspaper reader to the addict of detective stories. A thread of exuberance, joyousness, impishness even, runs through his writing. "The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of vice." He saw things nobody else had seen, or saw them differently.

American liberals needed to be reminded, for example, that, "America is the only country ever founded on a creed." And, more weightily, "The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."

There are those in the US who would like to see the word 'God' air-brushed out of existence, but if it were, in what would the dollar trust? Obama? I joke not.

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas said, recently: "Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is - we are above that now. We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial. We stand for something, I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above the world, he's sort of God."

A prophet coming into his own

Now, as if the British wish to distance themselves from the alarming truism that a prophet is never known in his country, they are coming round to the idea of taking up the cause of Chesterton. When William Oddie, author of the recent Chesterton and The Romance of Orthodoxy, addressed 500 members of the dynamic American Chesterton Society last year, he was asked what stage the cause of Chesterton's beatification had reached. The question floored him but it set him thinking.

So, presumably in reaction to this American awareness, Oddie wrote an impressive full page article - The Holiness of Chesterton - in the June 5 edition of the Catholic Herald. It makes one wonder why it had not crossed his mind that there were at least tell-tale signs of the man's sanctity. Four scholars, including himself, Ian Ker, John Saward and Fr Aidan Nichols OP, will discuss this topic in Oxford on July 4. Details are available at www.gkchesterton.org.uk.

England, which will soon have Cardinal Newman raised to sainthood, needs more saints; this makes it all the odder that a man referred to by Pope Pius XI as a "gifted defender of the Catholic Faith" has had to wait this long for his cause to be heard.

Oddie believes that as in the story of many saints "in which personal crisis is followed by a moment of vision, a moment in which there is a personal encounter with God which brings about a complete change of direction," there was such a moment in Chesterton's life. It took place in 1894 when Chesterton was 20 and had been experiencing periodic bouts of depression, after the last of which he had written to a friend:

"Inwardly speaking I have had a funny time. A meaningless fit of depression came upon me, and (I) went very far into the abysses indeed. The result was that I found that things, when examined, necessarily spelt such a mystically satisfactory state of things, that without getting back to earth I saw lots that made me certain it is all right. The vision is fading into common day now, and I am glad. It is embarrassing talking to God face to face, as a man speaketh to a friend."

No wonder he took on rationalists with such relish. "The extraordinary thing is this. They did prove to me that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic. One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of nature another that it comforted men with a fictitious providence. One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool's paradise. The charges seemed inconsistent. The state of the Christian could not be at once so uncomfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it."

Chesterton's place in Malta

I promised to devote today's piece to Chesterton well before I realised that this Sunday would be post-EP elections. There was a reason for writing this on the anniversary of his death; for writing about a man of holiness, humour, wit and intellect, a philosopher and a theologian who had studied neither philosophy nor theology, an essayist, a historian, a biographer, an author, formidable polemicist, literary critic, broadcaster, poet and a writer of pensees, this one taken from Oddie's article (Have you ever known what it is to walk/Along a road in such a frame of mind/That you thought you might meet God at any turn of the path?).

It was, is, to ask why Chesterton no longer features in our schools, why our seminarians have probably never heard of him, why Chesterton is not read at our University. Dun Karm would have been appalled.

Some time ago Oliver Friggieri generously forwarded a sort of memorare by our national poet, Iz-Żjara Tieghi lil G.K.C., for which I only thanked him last Friday. It was written at the time when Chesterton visited Malta in 1934. Dun Karm recalled he met with him at the Osborne Hotel on a cloudy, humid Tuesday afternoon on May 15, was offered a cigar which he declined, discussed the weather, inevitably (what do you do with an Englishman?) and enquired after his health, which was poorly.

They discussed books. Dun Karm mentioned Thomas Aquinas, brought up Fr C.C. Martindale and, of course, Belloc, at the sound of whose name Chesterton's face "lit up". Malta, he told our guest, was honoured by his presence. Chesterton smiled at that. Dun Karm then rose to excuse himself, shook hands and left with memories of a 30-minute chat he would never forget.

Were he alive today, Dun Karm would have made sure that Chesterton's works featured in the curriculum, as a subject at the University and, as relevant, in our seminaries. Who will take up the case for Chesterton in Malta while his cause is fought in England? The rector sounds like a good first cause to bring about this effect; encouraging him should be Archbishop Paul Cremona and Gozo Bishop Mario Grech.