What Chesterton Taught Me
Laughter
I’ve decided to write this now because I’ve noticed my consumption of Chesterton’s writings has fallen off. I still read the odd article and revisit an old quote, but I have read considerably less of Chesterton in the recent months. This is in stark contrast to where I was even two years ago, reading two or three of his books in a year along with a dozen or so articles. Anyone within ear shot of me would have heard me regularly quoting him. In fact, it may be accurate to say that since I read Orthodoxy in the summer of 2020, I have ceased to have a truly original thought about the big and important things of life. This isn’t all that surprising. I want to be right about the big and important things in life. Chesterton is right about the big and important things in life. No need for originality there. But I have been reading less and less of him. I think part of the reason is that I’ve run out of his major works. Since discovering G. K. Chesterton six years ago, I have read approximately 17 of his books, a splattering of some two or three dozen articles, every Father Brown in existence, a handful of his poems (including his hymn), and even the biography of his wife, Francis Blogg. I discovered and read whatever I could from Dale Ahlquist at the Society of G.K. Chesterton. I read the works of those in Chesterton’s orbit such as C.S. Lewis, Hillarie Belloc, and Ronald Knox (not an exhaustive list). Even having read all that, I still come across a book I had never heard of or an essay I had never seen. This is not surprising given that he wrote over 80 books, 4000 essays, 200 short stories, and hundreds of poems. Nevertheless, I am reading less and less of him. Partly because I want to take a step back and evaluate Chesterton, and partly because I think I have evaluated him. I think I know what he was getting at. That’s what I want to describe here. Taking all that I have read, I want to summarize his main point, the thesis of his life, so to speak. Or, to put it in a more Chestertonian phrase, I have looked at Chesterton nine-hundred and ninety nine times, and now I will look at him for the thousandth time in the hopes of seeing him for the first time.
Who Chesterton Was
Let me start off by saying what has been said about Chesterton so that we can get it out of the way. Ronald Knox once said he,
“[had] never had an argument which threatened to get to the root of things without finding myself tempted at some point to fall back on the phrase, ‘Chesterton says somewhere.1’”
C.S. Lewis says of him:
“His humour was of the kind which I like best--not ‘jokes’ imbedded in the page like currants in a cake, still less (what I cannot endure), a general tone of flippancy and jocularity, but the humour which is not in any way separable from the argument but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the ‘bloom’ on dialectic itself. The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly.2”
The Thomistic scholar Ettienne Gilson once said of Chesterton:
“Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty.3”
All of this I can attest to being the utmost truth. Chesterton’s impact is quite impossible to overstate. He wrote about politics, faith, apologetics, feminism, eugenics, Hitler, and socialism. He wrote poetry, plays, novels, mysteries, and hymns. I loved everything I ever read from Chesterton. So now I want to ask the broad and nearly impossible question, what was he trying to get at? If you could boil all his writing down, what would you get? What is the point he is trying to make every single time he writes? I’ve thought a lot about it, and I will make my humble suggestion in the next paragraph.
What Was Chesterton Getting At?
I think the point in all of Chesterton’s writing comes back to the very last line of Orthodoxy:
“There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.4”
Reflecting on the Chesterton I have read, this sentiment seems to sit consistently in the background. This concept of the deep, hidden mysterious of God, are actually the really good things. That somehow, if we could understand the mind of God, we might also understand a colossal inside joke. That mirth is more mysterious than despair and laughter more puzzling than a paradox. Part of the reason I think this is simply because of how Chesterton writes. Neil Gaiman put it best when he said,
“I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.5”
One always gets the impression that Chesterton himself is telling a joke with every clever paradox or witty turn of phrase. But it isn’t a derisive joke, or a pun, or one with a punchline. It’s often a shift in perspective that shows the fundamental humor in reality6. He once said the earth spun because it is constantly looking over its shoulder7. He once complained that man is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful, and therefore must be a woman (much funnier in context, see footnote)89. He solemnly compared marriage to a duel and stated that there was never such a thing as a “prudent marriage”10. One of his novels has such an incomprehensibly grave and yet situationally funny plot: an atheist and a theist try and duel to the death, but the police keep interrupting them11. In all these examples there is a whisper of a humungous joke. They are all quite funny and yet he has told no joke. He has written no punchline. He has merely said a truism, which was the bravest thing he said anyone could ever say12.
All this is suggestive of something so much bigger and so much funnier. If you still aren’t convinced, I commend his essay “A Defense of Baby Worship” to your reading13. I think it typifies in the best way the mystery of humor and truth.
The Fundamentals of God
What I am suggesting goes deeper than a mere literary summary of an early 20th century author. Chesterton speculated, with no idle words, that deep within the secrets of God, was laughter. We have very little evidence to suggest that God does laugh. St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom say He never laughed and that we ought not as well. This idea has been developed elsewhere, but in many ways we find no evidence because we have sinned and grown old and don’t know what laughter is141516. That’s why Chesterton speculates it to be something hidden. A riddle and a question, more satisfying than the answers of men17. To put it in a more Chestertonian way, the way of saying truisms without explaining them, the Gospel tells us to become like little children, and little children laugh.
Surprised by Joy, chapter 12
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith). Orthodoxy (pp. 130-131).
I wrote this sentence even though it reeks of AI. I apologize.
A Glimpse of My Own Country, Tremendous Trifles
The Napoleon of Notting Hill, chapter 1
The Man who Thinks Backwards, A Miscellany of Men
Manalive, chapter 4
The Ball and the Cross
From his book G.F. Watts, 1904
Orthodoxy, chapter 14
Growing Young, song by Rich Mullins
Also an Orthodoxy blog I found: https://frbillsorthodoxblog.com/2020/08/07/210-the-dry-humor-of-jesus-except-for-one-time/
Introduction to the Book of Job, by G.K. Chesterton