G.K. Chesterton (I)

The first of two posts on GKC. The second will follow later today at 12.00.

From The St Barnabas Society FB Page

G.K. Chesterton was regarded by C.S. Lewis as “the most sensible man alive” and Monsignor Ronald Knox called him his “oracle of orthodoxy” when he converted to the Catholic Faith. Chesterton was much loved by those who knew him and relished by those who read him or heard him speak, so much so that even his fiercest critics – H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw among them – regarded him as a friend! He became a remarkable spokesman for the Catholic Church. His popular appeal lay largely in the fact that he was a patriot and therefore the complete opposite of what ordinary people believed a Roman Catholic to be.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Kensington, London, in 1874, into a very close and loving family. He was one of just two children. He was educated at St Paul’s School, after which he trained to be an artist. He finally settled upon a career in journalism, the motivation for which was very aptly summoned up by someone close to him:

“He passionately believed that he had something to say to the people – a moral message in a world going to the asylum, if not to the dogs. The idea of Chesterton as a prophet is not far-fetched. Ideas cascaded from him! He literally worked himself to death in order to express joy in the world and help the poor and helpless.”

Between 1902 and 1914 he worked tirelessly writing newspaper columns, magazine articles and literary works of fiction including The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man who was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross and, of course, his famous Father Brown detective stories. He added to this works of literary criticism, books about Robert Browning, Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, and a publication called The Victorian Age in Literature. His prophetic gifts revealed themselves in Heretics, Orthodoxy and What’s Wrong With the World. He even wrote a major poetic epic called The Ballad of the White Horse.

He was baptised in the Church of England but not raised as an Anglican - more as a Unitarian. Two events were to strongly influence his future. In 1896 he met a young author called Frances Blogg, who was a strong Anglo-Catholic and eventually became his wife. He also met and befriended the Anglo-French writer and historian Hilaire Belloc, a cradle Roman Catholic. These two relationships caused him some deep soul-searching, much of which was to express itself in what he wrote.

Chesterton was shocked when his brother became a Catholic in 1911. Cecil was killed in the First World War and his death, coupled with serious illness, caused G.K. to think still more deeply about his own situation and ask himself where his religious life was going. He did not become a Roman Catholic until 1922, but it was rumoured that he would convert long before that. His friendship with a priest called Father John O’Connor was the cause of this. Father Brown in Chesterton’s detective stories is based upon O’Connor. Their conversations helped to make Roman Catholicism a more attractive proposition for Chesterton, as did his precarious state of health. He described it in these words.

“It brought me in a manner face to face with those morbid but vivid problems of the soul and gave me a great and growing sense that I had not found any spiritual solution of them. That the Catholic Church knew more about good than I did was easy to believe. That she knew more about evil than I did seemed incredible.”

He was finally received into the Church on Sunday, July 30th 1922. He and Frances had made their home in Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, in a house called Top Meadow. It was eventually bequeathed to the Converts Aid Society. There was no Catholic church in the town at that time so, as a consequence, the ceremony took place in a building adjacent to The Earl of Beaconsfield public house. Chesterton described his conversion thus:

“I have found one Creed that could not be satisfied with A truth, but only with THE TRUTH, which is made up of a million such truths and yet is one.”

(To be continued)