"daring to discuss the important and the amusing"

NEWSLETTER #5

SUMMER 2001

In 1908, a disillusioned fifteen-year-old Dorothy Sayers read Chesterton’s description of the church as a heavenly chariot "thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect." Her disillusionment gave way to excitement, and her faith was rekindled.

I have been asked many times this past year, "What’s up with this guy Chesterton?" Where to begin? When it comes to reading up on Chesterton, there are many fine sources (perhaps none better than Chesterton himself). The problem is more nearly finding a place to end–reading Chesterton is habit-forming. In any event, here are some teasing tidbits I’ve picked up along the way.

In what should be an encouragement to many a young parent, Chesterton’s schoolteachers described him as "always in trouble," "wildly inaccurate about everything," "not on the same plane with the rest," and as having "an inconceivable knack of forgetting at the shortest notice." Nevertheless, his genius was not long suppressed. As a teenager, Chesterton and his friends started a debating club and a literary magazine, in which the budding critic began to display his uncommon talents.

Chesterton loved to argue (and argue he did–he and his brother Cecil once argued for eighteen hours and thirteen minutes) but hated to quarrel. The problem with a quarrel, he said, is that is so often interrupts a good argument. This, I think, is one of the great keys to the genius who was Chesterton. When we fail to distinguish between arguing and quarreling (and they are often treated as synonyms), we either shy away from making arguments for fear that they will offend, or we make quarrelsome arguments which do offend. In Chesterton’s case, even those among his audience who hated the arguments loved the arguer.

In short, the effect Chesterton had on Sayers illustrates his great gift: he made the Christian faith seem not only plausible, not even merely probable, but attractive. "To the young people of my generation," Sayers wrote, "G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator."

Although some undoubtedly go overboard with uncritical adoration of Chesterton, his influence is nevertheless almost hard to overstate. Chesterton biographer Joseph Pearce opens his recent Literary Converts by stating that GKC’s Orthodoxy "heralded a Christian literary revival which, throughout the twentieth century, represented an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age." Indeed, Malcolm Muggeridge called him "an impressive prophet," and Graham Greene "an underestimated poet." He was read by T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkein, Charles Williams, Evelyn Waugh, and Edith Stilwell. He influenced the strangest collection of people, from Agatha Christie to Mahatma Gandhi. Even H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw appreciated him, despite his brandishing them heretics. ("I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic–that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.") Undergirding Chesterton’s diverse writings and arguments is a consistent charity of spirit and sense of humor. "He is so gay," wrote Kafka, "that one might almost believe he had found God."

Finding God–that was the end toward which Chesterton spilled a legendary amount of ink. Take C.S. Lewis as just one, albeit prominent, example of Chesterton’s influence. Lewis first encountered Chesterton as a hospital-ridden nineteen-year-old:

"It was here that I first read a volume of Chesterton’s essays. I had never heard of him and had no idea of what he stood for; nor can I quite understand why he made such an immediate conquest of me. It might have been expected that my pessimism, my atheism, and my hatred of sentiment would have made him to me the least congenial of all authors. I was by now a sufficiently experienced reader to distinguish liking from agreement. I did not need to accept what Chesterton said in order to enjoy it. His humour was of the kind which I like best."

Lewis concluded that "Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity." Then Lewis read Everlasting Man, "and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense."

"In reading Chesterton," Lewis later reflected, "I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere–‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises’, as Herbert says, ‘fine nets and strategems’. God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."

There’s much, much more. There’s much more, in fact, on this same topic next Sunday evening at Chesterton House, when we will be hosting Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society. Ahlquist’s lecture is entitled "Who is G.K. Chesterton? (And where did C.S. Lewis get so many good ideas?)" Please join us if you can.

In addition to the details on this lecture and a preview of our first movie night of the fall semester, you will find below a short summary of our first year’s activities at Chesterton House, and a short GKC poem tossed in for no extra charge. Thank you for your interest in and support of Chesterton House.

-Karl E. Johnson

Just one year ago Chesterton House was little more than a concept. With the help of many people, we made some real progress during our first year of operation. Much of the work has been behind the scenes–incorporating, making brochures, etc. More visibly, the resource room–ideally located in the Crossroads Life Center facility–now has the better part of our first 1000 volumes, and is staffed regularly on Friday afternoons. As for programming, Chesterton House collaborated with a number of local churches and campus ministries to co-sponsor a variety of lectures, roundtables, and reading groups. Not least of all, monthly movie nights have been a great opportunity to reflect on Hollywood films and culture. All of these things hang together on the simple message that thinking Christianly matters.

This year, we kick off with our first movie night on the second day of classes (see below). We plan to continue supporting GradIV roundtables, and to add a new reading group for undergraduates. We also have some great speakers coming in (though we’ll leave you hanging until the next newsletter for details).

Long-term plans for Chesterton House include a Veritas Forum, a Faculty Fireside series, student essay contests, and eventually classes for credit. We are currently seeking funding to help make this next level of programming possible.

All events are held at the Crossroads Life Center. Crossroads is located at 604 E. Buffalo, on the corner of Stewart Ave. in lower Collegetown.

Lecture: "Who is G.K. Chesterton?

(And where did C.S. Lewis get so many good ideas?)"

Dale Ahlquist, President, American Chesterton Society

Before there was C.S. Lewis, there was G.K. Chesterton. In fact, there would have been no C.S. Lewis (as we know him) if not for the influence of G.K. Chesterton, who was a master of Christian Apologetics and of the English Language. Come hear Dale Ahlquist introduce us to this profound, prolific, and prophetic writer.

Resource Room Open Hours

Coinciding with the first week of classes, the Chesterton House resource room will be staffed on Friday afternoons, providing assistance in finding materials on Christianity and anything or everything.

Movie Night: "Fight Club"

Steve Froehlich, our resident recovering filmaholic, calls it an "intelligent and jarring film." He writes:

David Fincher (The Game, Seven, Alien 3) tells us that he is giving us front row seats for the theatre of mass destruction.  The fight, the deep soul struggle to break free from the modern mania of consumerism and the cult of New Age sensitivity wages between Durden (Brad Pitt) and the nameless narrator (Edward Norton) who goes by "Jack" as he wanders like a tourist from one self-help and recovery group to another.  "Our great war is a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives," preaches Durden.

Fight Club is a visual spectacle.  Not everyone will like the way it tells the story and describes the way men (and women) are desperate to escape the dehumanizing trap of modern materialism. The tension of this film [is that] individual human life really does have worth after all. It’s worth the struggle to tear down all the icons of our age that makes us slaves, sub-human, isolated.  Ironically, Durden’s charismatic and violent liberation itself becomes a new tyranny, which Jack comes to realize as the film moves into its final act. -SDF

See Steve’s full review at http://www.chestertonhouse.org/fightclub.html

Movie Night: "Contact"

If you type "G.K. Chesterton" in any search engine, you can easily waste wonderful hours reading quotes, anecdotes, poetry, and paradoxes. In order to help you waste your time well, I suggest starting with the American Chesterton Society: http://www.chesterton.org/ There you will find extensive excerpts of Chesterton’s writings categorized by topic, information on Gilbert! Magazine and local Chesterton societies, and of course links to many other worthwhile pages.

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.

- GKC