The Wisdom and Innocence of G.K. Chesterton

'Chesterton presents us with the Everlasting Man, Jesus Christ, the personification of the good, the true and the beautiful, who is the incarnation of perfect wisdom and perfect innocence.'

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Against the reductionist nowhere man who cannot love his nowhere neighbour because he does not love his nowhere God, Chesterton presents us with the Everlasting Man, Jesus Christ, the personification of the good, the true and the beautiful, who is the incarnation of perfect wisdom and perfect innocence.

My first book, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, was published over twenty-five years ago, first in the UK and then by Ignatius Press in the United States. The idea for the book’s title was inspired by the title of two of Chesterton’s volumes of Father Brown stories, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914). The title of the two volumes, taken together, encapsulate the paradox at the heart of the priest detective’s character. Father Brown is both innocent and wise, a combination which strikes the worldly cynic as being a contradiction. According to the notions of worldly “wisdom”, innocence is akin to naiveté, which is the absence of wisdom. One cannot be both innocent and wise. On the contrary, one must lose one’s innocence in order to gain the wisdom that comes from experience. This is the view of the world. It was not, however, the view of Father Brown, nor was it the view of Chesterton, Father Brown’s creator. More to the point, it is not the view of Chesterton’s own Creator.

In order to get to the heart of this paradox, it’s important to start at the very beginning – a very good place to start!

In the beginning, Man was as innocent as the God who made him. He was not innocent in the sense that the world understands the word but in the deeper sense that he was innocent of all charges that might be brought against him. From this innocent perspective, there was no barrier between his own goodness and the goodness of God, enabling him to understand God more intimately than would be possible once he’d lost his innocence. In choosing not to know evil, in choosing not to experience it, he could live in the fullness of goodness. Having chosen evil, which is nothing but the absence of the good, he’d chosen to distance himself from the fullness of goodness, which is God Himself. Henceforth, Man’s wisdom would always be compromised by his lack of innocence.

Having consciously chosen the absence of the light and love of God’s goodness, Man found himself in a land of shadows. He could no longer see clearly but he could still to choose to see, albeit through a glass darkly, or he could choose not to see. To see or not to see. That was the question. As for the answer, it was to be found in the choice between humility or its absence (pride). Henceforth, humility, which is at least a desire for innocence, would be necessary for perceiving reality. Humility results in a sense of gratitude which is necessary to the opening of the eyes in wonder (innocence). It is only when the eyes are opened in wonder that the mind can be moved to the meaningful contemplation which dilates the mind and soul into a deeper understanding of reality. This is the inextricable, inescapable connection between wisdom and innocence.

It is in this deep theological sense that Father Brown is both wise and innocent. He is wise because he is innocent. It is this wisdom, born of innocence, which gives him the edge in solving crimes. His eyes are not blinded by prejudice, the consequence of pride, but are opened with the wonder that leads to wisdom.

And what is true of Father Brown is equally true of the creator of Father Brown. The secret of Chesterton’s success as a Christian apologist is to be found in the way in which he shows that wisdom and innocence are necessary for the practice of reason. This dependence on wisdom and innocence means that practical reason is inseparable from virtue. Each is as indissolubly wedded to the other as are wisdom and innocence themselves. This connection between reason and virtue leads naturally and rationally to the connection between faith and reason. One is in need of the other. Faith without reason becomes mere credulity, which is unsustainable in the light of reason. Prideful “reason”, without faith, is not really reason itself but sophistry and mere reductionism, in which everything is reduced to nothing but mere matter or mere mind. And, if reality can be reduced to mere matter or mere mind, the inevitable consequence is that nothing matters and that we don’t mind what is done with it. And that “it” includes ourselves and our neighbours.  When we refuse to believe that God exists, we cease to believe that Man exists. We are left with the banal and pathetic shadow of reality that John Lennon presents to us, where there is no religion because we are all nowhere men, living in our nowhere lands, making all our nowhere plans for nobody.

Against this reductionist nowhere man who cannot love his nowhere neighbour because he does not love his nowhere God, Chesterton presents us with the Everlasting Man, Jesus Christ, the personification of the good, the true and the beautiful, who is the incarnation of perfect wisdom and perfect innocence. It is in striving to become as wise and innocent as Wisdom and Innocence Himself that we can become everlasting men in the eternal presence of the Everlasting Man.

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The featured image is “Portrait of Chesterton Sitting” (no later than 1914), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.