The genius of Chesterton

It is now over 75 years since Gilbert Keith Chesterton died in 1936, yet, interest in him and his writings have persisted. If anything, there is a resurgence of interest in this outstanding person.

However, at school as a child and young adult, Chesterton did not show much promise at all. His height, untidiness and absent mindedness made him the target of jokes by his fellow schoolboys and his teachers. Yet, his easygoing, inoffensive manner enabled him to make friends once he went to his secondary school at the age of 13.

The joint setting up of a Junior Debating Club and the subsequent magazine The Debater gave him a platform for debate, writing and literary criticism that led him to win a prize for poetry by the time he left school at the age of 18. The school’s High Master confided to his mother: “Six foot of genius. Cherish him, Mrs Chesterton, cherish him.”

Chesterton was large in more ways than one. Physically, he was an enormous man who weighed about 350 pounds who loved to eat and drink as much as to read and argue. He was one of the deepest lucid thinkers of his time and influenced prominent people and intellectuals as disparate as the future ruler of India, Mahatma Gandhi, the Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis, and the Irish revolutionary, Michael Collins.

A characteristic that made Chesterton attractive to many people was his magnanimity and strong sense of fairness. Throughout his book The Ball And The Cross, in the clash between an atheist and a Christian, Chesterton presents the atheist as much a hero and a man to be admired as the Christian.

His generous respect for adversaries is reflected in his close friendship with the atheists Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. He was not frightened of friends who would constantly challenge his deepest convictions. On the contrary, their debating kept him lively, focused and sharp.

Chesterton’s work includes every type of writing. His enormous output of writing covered an astonishing diversity and range of subjects including poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, biography, political and social argument, playwriting, detective fiction and Christian apologetics.

Yet, his main interest was journalism and he pumped out over 4,000 articles debating on any issue, criticising the social ills of society and promoting his philosophy of economics under the banner of Distributism.

He fiercely defended tradition, private property and the family, attacking capitalism and socialism that concentrated power and money in the hands of the few. He challenged the ideologies that dominated the last century with the disastrous effects we are now so familiar with and their negative impact on the social fabric and the environment.

Chesterton was also prophetic.

In 1919, he commented that communism would not lead to revolutionary democracy but to the establishment of an enormous bureaucracy. In communist Russia, writings forbidden by the state were circulated in the secret underground system termed Samizdat, a practice that risked long sentences in slave-camps or death. Chesterton’s writings were among the most cherished in keeping alive the faith and hopes of the Russian people.

His works are now gaining popularity not only in the West but also in Latin America and in far away Japan where, in 19 years, 40,000 volumes of Orthodoxy were sold.

Here in Malta, we have the opportunity to kindle interest in this great writer and acknowledged genius.

Thanks to the initiative started by the late John Micallef, alias Roamer, a conference on the theme Chesterton As A journalist will be addressed by two world class experts on Chesterton from the Chesterton Institute of New Jersey, USA on May 15 at 6 p.m. at the University.