The Everlasting Man

The Scriptorium, Book Three

I liked G. K. Chesterton before anyone else did. I’m not old or cool enough to be able to claim this about, say, Bob Dylan or Nick Drake or James Ellroy or anyone like that, and I’m not by nature an early adopter. This is why I got into trouble for refusing those safe and effective vaccines a few years back, and why I still don’t know (or care) how a smartphone works. But there are a few things in my life I stumbled upon before the herd, and Gilbert Keith is one of them.

GKC is quite fashionable these days amongst a certain type of ‘trad’ on the Internet. These chaps can sometimes be encountered out in the wild, smoking pipes, wearing waistcoats and quoting Tolkein on their way to the TLM in their local Catholic Church. They are living, quite deliberately, at least a hundred years ago because they are bewildered and resentful of the modern project and they are pleased to have found someone else who, in sparkling and occasionally baroque prose, can explain why. I don’t resent their incursion on my turf, though. Indeed, I welcome them into the fold of true believers.

I discovered GKC back in the mid-1990s. I was working for a green activist group in London and spending my spare time writing poetry and wandering around protest camps and old churches. Inside my young and confused soul was a push-and-pull of apparently conflicting tendencies and views. At any rate, the world told me they were conflicting. In this world, if you got involved in politics in any way, you had to be ‘left’ or ‘right.’ If you were ‘left’ you didn’t like capitalism and inequality and patriotism and war. Instead, you liked progress and equality and wealth redistribution and this new thing called ‘the environment.’ If you were ‘right’ you didn’t like equality or wealth redistribution, and you didn’t much like this ‘environment’ unless you could sell it. But you did like patriotism, capitalism, individual liberty, the Queen and something called ‘tradition.’

All of this was confusing to me, because I liked patriotism, the environment, individual liberty, tradition (well, some of it), and the idea of redistributing wealth and power, but I didn’t like war, progress, capitalism or inequality. I didn’t know what I thought about the Queen, or indeed the State, but I hated corporations and I mostly thought people should be left alone - or at least, that I should. The Machine was already bearing down on me, though I was a long way from naming it. I also had a nagging sense that the world I could see around me was only a part of something much bigger that I couldn’t pin down, and neither of the teams seemed to have much time for that idea. What was a young Romantic to do?

Then, one day, I picked up a copy of Chesterton’s novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and was intrigued. On finishing it, I went looking for The Man Who Was Thursday, and then got myself a book of his poems. When I came across The Secret People, his epic, prophetic take on the story of England, I was hooked. Discovering that he had written non-fiction too, I dug into some of that, and soon discovered distributism, the political theory he had developed with his friend Hilaire Belloc, to offer an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. According to Chesterton, this amounted to guaranteeing ‘three acres and a cow’ to everyone who wanted it. This man, it seemed, reflected the paradoxes of my own worldview - only he didn’t think they were paradoxes. Instead, he had a way of writing about them which made them seem the most natural thing in the world.

Writing in The Atlantic a few years ago, James Parker, another long-time fan, tried to sum those paradoxes up:

Chesterton was a journalist; he was a metaphysician. He was a reactionary; he was a radical. He was a modernist, acutely alive to the rupture in consciousness that produced Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”; he was an anti-modernist (he hated Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”). He was a parochial Englishman and a post-Victorian gasbag; he was a mystic wedded to eternity. All of these cheerfully contradictory things are true, and none of them would matter in the slightest were it not for the final, resolving fact that he was a genius.

One day, fresh from reading his biography, I made a lone lunchtime pilgrimage to The Cheshire Cheese, the pub on The Strand in which Chesterton and Belloc and their cronies used to meet to discuss writing and ideas. Chesterton’s love of English pubs and real ale was another big mark in his favour as far as I was concerned. Alone at a table in the back, I raised a glass of the brown stuff to the memory of Gilbert and filled myself up with meat pie. I felt this was the kind of lunchbreak he would have approved of.

One thing I avoided in Chesterton’s writing, though, were his Christian apologetics. I had no interest in this as a young man. In my view, his obsessive claim that only the Catholic Church offered a route out of the desert of modernity sounded antiquated and Victorian, a bit like the Church itself. Perhaps, like the capes he wore in the street, it was deliberately so. Anyway, you could avoid it easily enough if you stuck to the essays, poems and novels. Chesterton tended to confine his apologetics to specific books, and it was easy enough not to read them.

These days I have a different attitude, of course. Now it’s his Christian books that intrigue me most. I should have known all along that Chesterton’s politics emerged from his spirituality and not the other way around. Had I read any of his polemics back then, in fact, I would have seen how he treated religion almost as a branch of politics. Chesterton is no mystic, not really. For him, the ‘Church militant’ is an ongoing spiritual revolution, in which God’s decision to intervene in human history fires the starting gun for everything that happens afterwards. It is in this context that capitalism, to Chesterton, becomes not just an unfair economic system but a sin against Christian justice. Distributism, meanwhile, is a form of repentance. GKC’s worldview is totalising - and totally Catholic.

Reading The Everlasting Man makes this abundantly clear. It makes a few other things abundantly clear too, one of them being that his non-fiction, in this case at least, is considerably more circumlocutary than his fiction. In his novels, Chesterton at least has to pretend to be contending with plot and characterisation in the cause of advancing his ideas. Without those two things, all that remains is the ideas, and Chesterton can get himself tangled up in them.

There was, I felt, a lot of tangling in this book, and it was in large part due to GKC’s fondness for what has come to be known as the ‘Chestertonian paradox.’ He will write sentences like ‘To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it’; or ‘It is not natural to see man as a natural product’. At its best, this kind of writing illuminates old questions from new angles; at its worst it just confuses everything and makes some of the reading hard work. It is, I suspect, one reason that Chesterton is not widely read now. He is, very often, too clever by half.

Reading this book, then, gave me less of a thrill than my young discoveries did, or that his novels or poems had done. I think now that Chesterton is at his best when he is telling a story. On the other hand, we could say that Chesterton is, in fact, telling a story here - or re-telling one. It is the story of Christ, the ‘everlasting man’ of the title. That story, according to GKC, amounts to one word: revolution. If this book does one thing well (and it does several things well) it is insisting on just how unique the Christian faith is. After all, says Chesterton, there is only one faith on Earth which believed its founder to be the Creator himself, incomprehensibly clothed in human flesh:

There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all religions are equal because all the religious founders are rivals; they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more than Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Brahma. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman.

The central claim of this book is that this uniqueness also makes the Church unique, and means that Christianity changed the world in a way that no other force has done - or, assuming it is true, can ever do. The notion that the Creator Himself ‘talked with tax collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand years’, he writes towards the end of the book, is ‘something utterly unlike anything else in nature.’ This, regardless of your own beliefs, is simply true. If this book had one effect on me it was to remind me, forcibly, of the unique and radical nature of the Christian faith.

It’s hard to review this book, though. This is partly because it says so much - too much, I ended up feeling. And it is partly because the long sentences, the endless paradoxes and the language games, while sometimes illuminating or entertaining, muddle the narrative in the end. Muddling too, for twenty-first century readers, are some of the archaisms (constant references to ‘savages’ and the like), as well as authorial obsessions that now seem irrelevant (Gilbert seems to have a beef with Christian Scientists, for example, which goes on for half the book.) It’s telling that Chesterton himself inserted an afterword, by his own admission, so that he could sum up the point he had so far failed to make clear. Even there, though, the point is not especially clear. This, I think, is because there is no point; or rather, there are many of them, all being made at once. Chesterton had many talents, but brevity and concision were not among them.

For this reason, in the name of a serviceable review, I’m going to simply list a few of the points that grabbed me the most:

‘It is not natural to see man as a natural product.’ In this one line, Chesterton overturns the worldview I held for decades: that humans are just another animal species. We are an animal species, of course; but it’s the ‘just another’ that was always the error. This is perhaps the standard understanding of our role on Earth today, especially amongst the sort of green thinkers that I used to be: that we don’t have a special role. We just happened to evolve in this shape, and we’re just a few genetic degrees away from shellfish or bananas. On the contrary, GKC claims, ‘the simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being, almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one.’ It’s hard to argue.

‘There is no comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than there is between a man and the men who walked about in his dreams.’ This line sums up much of that Chesterton’s long case against paganism - or rather, for Christianity’s genuine distinctiveness from it. Chesterton believes that, contra the popular belief that ‘polytheism’ was replaced by ‘monotheism’, it is more likely that older cultures adhered to the ‘great original simplicity of a single authority in all things’, and he uses examples to make his argument. It’s an intriguing idea: that polytheism, rather than being some natural human state, was a decadent muddle which could never last. The genuinely old worldview, by contrast, is that of ‘the fatherhood that makes the whole world one.’

Good vs bad paganism. There is, however, a kind of paganism which is ‘innocent and in touch with nature’, and this kind ‘can be patronised by patron saints as much as by pagan gods.’ Indeed, the Church has long made sure this was the case; and a good thing it is too. Chesterton had no time for puritans. His Christianity encompassed maypoles, flagons of ale, comical stories and, in this case it seems, a sacralised landscape. Good news for lovers of holy wells.

Christianity is ‘the realisation both of mythology and philosophy.’ Chesterton makes this point more than once. The coming of Christ, he says, both supersedes mythology and replaces it. ‘There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation’, he writes, ‘when a man is tired of playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or the moon made love to a man.’ Myths are not needed after the resurrection, because they are only a shadow of what has just happened. They have their place - as does philosophy - but after Christ their role changes. They are, he says at one point, like rivers which ‘run parallel and do not mingle until they meet in the sea of Christendom.’

The Church is ‘a revolution against the price of this world.’ Another reason why Christianity is not the same as other faiths - and especially a reason it cannot be merged with them in some ‘open-minded’ act of syncretism - is that Christian values are opposed to the values of the world. This reviewer notes quietly that a lot of Christians seems to forget this a lot of the time.

A Church is necessary. Chesterton spends a lot of time - some of it laboured - pushing back against the popular notion that Jesus was simply a ‘meek and mild’ teacher whose kind prescriptions were later betrayed by a power-hungry dogmatic Church. This has been the standard line perhaps since the Renaissance, and Chesterton refutes it. Correctly, I think. Noting that the Church appears in the Bible itself, having been established by the disciples, he writes that ‘anybody’s common sense would tell him that enthusiasts, who only met through their common enthusiasm for a leader whom they loved, would not instantly rush away to establish everything that he hated.’

Christianity has died and been reborn endlessly. Chesterton ends his book with something of a prophecy, so let me end my review in responding to it. ‘The Five Deaths of the Faith’ is a great chapter title, and it does what it says on the tin, with GKC explaining that Christianity has been endlessly reborn just as everyone - including most of its adherents - have assumed it is dying, or dead. This made me sit up and think, given the state of the faith today in the West (though not elsewhere). I probably assume myself that there will be no Christian future here; that it’s all played out. But that has been assumed before, and just when all seems lost, some inexplicable rush of power comes forth from what is not, after all, a dead Church. Here’s GKC on the Irish church’s work to re-Christianise Europe after the barbarian invasions of the ‘Dark Ages’:

The rush of missionaries from Ireland, for instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an old world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour) ‘by rather slack Christians.’

Could it happen again? Stranger things have happened - at least five times, according to GKC. Chesterton thought a resurgence would indeed come again - because, after all, if its central claim is true, the Church can never die. ‘It is already clear’, he concludes, in another of his characteristic paradoxes, ‘and it grows clearer every day, that it is not going to end in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return of those parts of it that had really disappeared.’

Let’s hope he’s right. We could help make sure he is. In the meantime, I’d like to hear the thoughts, and read the reviews, of others. Feel free to post them below.

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The Scriptorium will be taking a hiatus for the winter. I have two books of my own to write over the next several months, and I need to concentrate on them. I hope to be back with this feature some time in 2025.