As Chesterton writes in The Thing, “all human beings, without any exception whatever, were specially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatitude.” Nature was made for grace.

G.K. Chesterton and Modernity

by Stratford Caldecott

I’m pretty sure G.K. Chesterton is in heaven, and therefore a saint—or at least I hope so, since this gives much hope to the rest of us. But, of course, he is not officially canonized. The campaign to introduce his Cause (if not the Cause itself) is underway. The appropriate bishop in Northampton diocese, where Chesterton died and is buried, recently appointed a priest to look into the possibility. Prayer cards are circulating, thanks to the American Chesterton Society. But before we get carried away, let me mention at least one good reason to discourage this frenetic activity on behalf of St. Gilbert.

Chesterton is often thought of as an amusing journalist and man of letters, a literary critic and novelist, but he was many other things besides—among them an artist, a poet, a playwright, a philosopher, and a theologian. Gilson praised him as a Thomist, while Ian Ker regards him as the worthy successor to Newman as Christian apologist. A new book called G.K. Chesterton, London, and Modernity presents him as a sophisticated commentator on the urban environment. His views on modernity and on reality itself have been widely quoted, and he is an influence on a surprisingly wide range of thinkers, such as Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, Antonio Gramsci, Rene Girard, S.R.L. Clark, Slavoj Zizek and John and Alison Milbank.

The reason not to spend time and effort discussing Chesterton’s sanctity—and fending off the inevitable but misguided accusations of anti-semitism along the way—is that we need to spend much more time and effort reading and understanding his critique of modernity and his proposals for an alternative. I believe that this is the more important task. By all means let us pray for his intercession, but it would be regrettable if a campaign for the canonization of Chesterton were to draw attention away from his intellectual contribution (unless we can have both, and I will return to this at the end).

So what was his critique of modernity, and what was the alternative he proposed?

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