Chesterton

The Paradoxes of an Inveterate Realist

In his works, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, author of novels, mysteries, essays, and saints’ lives, sets out the simple, disconcerting truths of Christianity while providing an exceptionally keen look at the crisis of contemporary man. Reality is nothing other than God’s field of action

by Laura Cotta Ramosino

Publication is imminent in the series of “Books of the Christian Spirit” of a collection (Il pugnale alato e altri racconti [The Dagger with Wings and Other Stories]) of stories by the English writer GK Chesterton, known in the English-speaking world simply as GKC, and elsewhere above all as the creator of the famous detective-priest Father Brown. He is a writer with an enormous profile (also physically) who conceals, behind his perhaps somewhat reductive fame of great mystery writer, an exceptionally up-to-date and acute gaze on the crisis of the contemporary world, whose seeds he detected as early as the beginning of the last century. However, Chesterton was not a gloomy prophet of crisis; rather, he was undoubtedly an inveterate optimist. Far from the “positive thinking” of so many pseudo-intellectuals, GK Chesterton’s optimism is born of reason: his joy came above all from his inexhaustible wonder at being alive. Thus he wrote in Orthodoxy, “But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.”

Simple, forgotten truths
If we had to use only one word to define Chesterton, this would certainly be “paradox.” For it is through a series of ingenious and disconcerting paradoxes that Chesterton shows us his vision of reality and of man. It is not a matter of a mere penchant for astounding the reader; very often the truths expounded by his protagonists are the simplest and most everyday ones–but precisely because of this, the most easily forgotten. For example, Innocent Smith, the protagonist of Manalive, says, “The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules.”
In his taste for paradox, Chesterton, however, reveals himself to be profoundly Christian. Are not the dogmas of the Trinity or of the divine and human natures of Christ paradoxes that challenge human reason to go beyond itself? Beyond itself, but never against itself. Because, as Father Brown says in The Blue Cross, “You attacked reason. It’s bad theology.” In effect, for Chesterton, Christianity is an eminently reasonable fact: “The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.”

Happiness is a physical place
In The Man Who Was Thursday, perhaps his best-known novel, Chesterton imagines that in England a terrible conspiracy of anarchists is going on, whose executive committee is made up of seven men, each named for a day of the week, and headed by the mysterious as he is dreadful man Sunday. Chesterton sees this anarchy not as a noble attempt to create a new world, but as the expression of the destructive ideology of a group of crazed intellectuals who are very distant from the people they boast of representing. Thus, the young poet Gabriel Syme joins a special anti-anarchist police force and infiltrates the organization until he manages to be admitted to the executive committee, with the name of Thursday. In one of his first clashes with an anarchist “colleague,” Syme expresses his trust in the everyday and the essence of poetry, in opposition to its destructive drift off-course: “You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hair-breadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word ‘Victoria,’ it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it is the victory of Adam.” In the end, we discover that the supreme committee of the anarchists is made up completely of policemen, of “well-intentioned young asses,” as Sunday calls them. In a wild, surreal finale, what began as a hunt for the supreme leader of anarchy becomes an extraordinary encounter with the mystery of life: “Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.” Perhaps the entire story (written before Chesterton officially converted to Catholicism) is nothing but an allegory of St Paul’s address in front of the Areopagus–all of reality is nothing other than the field of action of the unknown God who “allotted the times of men’s existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him–though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” But man’s fulfillment, Chesterton adds, is always found in a place, never in abstract generalizations: "For a more subtle study of the unities of time and place, for example, as outlined for the Greek drama, might have led us towards what is perhaps the last secret of all legend and literature. It might have suggested why poets, pagan or not, returned perpetually to the idea of happiness as a place for humanity as a person. It might suggest why the world is always seeking for absolutes that are not abstraction; why fairyland was always a land, and even the superman was almost a man."

A passion for detective stories
But Chesterton’s curiosity about reality is manifested above all in his passion for the narrative genre that would make him famous: the detective story. In a half-serious defense of popular literature in general and the detective story in particular, Chesterton says jokingly–but not completely–that “not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal. The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life.” At the foundation of the detective story, then, there is above all the attention to life and things that, if observed closely, can reveal their mysteries and secrets. Rather, according to Chesterton, a good detective story can even become the key to interpretation of human existence. “The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.”

Father Brown’s method
Chesterton wrote numerous detective stories, but there is no doubt that his most famous character is the mild, seemingly naïve Father Brown, the Catholic priest who uses his long experience in the confessional to study criminal psychology and solve the strangest crimes. By Chesterton’s own admission, Father Brown was inspired by the real Father O’Connor, who was instrumental in the writer’s conversion.
What is Father Brown’s method of investigation? Certainly not the “scientific” method of Sherlock Holmes, but rather that of an astounding ability to identify with the criminal. In The Secret of Father Brown, the little priest confesses to a journalist who is interviewing him that he himself is the murderer in all the crimes he has had to solve, adding, “I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action.” In The Hammer of God, which is an outstanding study of the Catholic, Protestant, and secular positions on man and sin, Father Brown adds humbly, “I am a man, and therefore have all devils in my heart.” It is precisely from this acknowledgment of the evil that is in every man, not just criminals, that the capacity for mercy arises, which is never solely human, but is a property only of the Christian. Father Brown’s greatness, even more than in his investigative gift, lies in his inexhaustible openness to the good that can be found even at the bottom of a murderer’s heart–an ecumenical genius that is fully Catholic, that leads him to fight, more than for the affirmation of an abstract justice, for the salvation of every soul who crosses his path.