Chesterton: Genius. And maybe holiness as well.

G.K. Chesterton: Rhetoric, Genius, & Holiness


by DAVID MILLS


He may even have waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, my friend, when he explained his dislike of G. K. Chesterton. “It’s all rhetoric,” he said, and his voice by itself comprehensively dismissed Chesterton as a writer one should read even if he hadn’t added the backhanded wave of his hand. He meant by rhetoric what others would have called “word games” and “verbal fireworks” or even “hot air”: an effect without meaning.

This left me bemused. Like the young man engaged to a woman both pretty and virtuous and more taken by her virtue than her beauty, whose friends assume that because she’s beautiful she can’t be virtuous, I had found in reading Chesterton someone who was obviously fun to read but more important to me saw deeply, a writer who uniquely showed me truths I had not seen or had not seen clearly.

That he wrote entertainingly was a bonus, as if liver tasted like filet mignon. Yet my friend, and several people I read, assumed that if he was fun to read — though some of them didn’t think he was all that much fun to read — he couldn’t be insightful.

In Chesterton I discovered a man who told me truths I needed to know. These truths were of two sorts: truths I did not see at all or truths I only intuited. In reading him I kept saying “Aha” or “So that’s it” when he showed me something I had not seen, and “Yes” and “Exactly” when he showed me clearly something I’d only seen dimly.

As an example of the first kind of insight, there was Chesterton’s line from The Catholic Church and Conversion that “We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. We want a religion that is right where we are wrong.” Well, yes, obviously, readers may be thinking.

But a Protestant attracted to the Catholic Church, at least a theologically-minded one, tends to come to her with a list of commitments the Catholic Church must satisfy. We are thinking about changing our fundamental religious identity but only if we can keep much of what we already hold. The Church has to be right where we are (we think) right. We look at the Church the way a man looks at a job offer when he’s fairly satisfied with the job he has and thinks the new job looks like a lateral move.
I looked at the Church like that, anyway. And then reading through Chesterton’s short book, I hit this one line and stopped short. I might have said that I wanted a Church that was right where I was wrong, but I was sure I was right about the commitments the Church must satisfy. I just wasn’t sure in which religious body I should hold them. On that, I would have said, the Church might be right where I was wrong, but she must be right where I was right on everything else.

Chesterton’s insight, so simply but pungently put, stopped me short. I think it was the contrast between the sentences, the first setting me up and the second knocking me down. Certainly the effect of having read so much Chesterton helped as well, because I knew and trusted the man and because I’d seen the way he came to this insight. I suddenly realized that I wanted a Church that was right where I was wrong and that I might be wrong, absolutely and completely wrong, about a great many things I thought I had down cold. I saw that I might just not be wrong a particular points but that I might be seeing the whole thing the wrong way round. I might need, as people used to say, a radical paradigm shift.

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