tl;dr
My Takeaways
- No matter how anti-dogmatic, open-minded, and progressive you are, you still have a core set of beliefs. And they’re probably wrong.
- To be interesting and exciting, you need to have a deep appreciation for the dull and common. To be strong, you need to be weak.
- It’s possible to find hope in life, not in spite of its difficulties, but because of them.
Should you read it?
If you have even a tiny knowledge of modern philosophy, get excited about different worldviews, or just enjoy great writing for its own sake, I highly recommend. Otherwise, you’ll find C.S. Lewis’ non-fiction to have similar ideas and be much more accessible. If you’re curious, get it for free and skim the chapters on:
- Introductory Remarks
- Mr. Bernard Shaw
- The Mildness of the Yellow Press
- Paganism
- On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family (this is the finest essay of the collection)
Review
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) is my new favorite writer. He’s in the same category of writer as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkein, combining serious literary scholarship, mythology, and excellent writing with a deep, well-articulated faith. Even in this one work, the influence that Chesterton had on Lewis is hard to miss.
Heretics is a collection of essays where Chesterton writes against the literary and philosophical giants of his day (and it’s old enough that it’s public domain, so don’t pay for it!). My knowledge of modern philosophy is pretty shallow, so most of his analysis goes right over my head. I’ve read H.G. Wells, but I don’t actually know about his worldview. I may have skimmed the Wikipedia page on George Bernard Shaw at some point, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what he thinks about the philosophy of art. I’ve barely scratched the surface on Nietzsche’s thought from reading Luc Ferry’s (poorly written and factually suspect, in my opinion) A Brief History of Thought. Chesterton assumes that you know something about these men and their ideas. If you’re like me and you don’t, it can be a little hard to follow his arguments.
Even if most of his what he says in this collection goes over my head, what I was able to pick up on was pure gold, making it a worthwhile read regardless. The sheer number of one-liner paradoxes alone are worth it, and the chapters on worldview, progressivism and the family are outstanding. But most encouraging and transformative to me was the “strong sense of an unuttered joy” that pervades the entire collection.
Rhetoric
The first thing that charmed me about these essays was the respect he had for his opponents. Most arguments today demonize their opponents. Chesterton nearly eulogizes them: he shares only the positive, only the best, only the most respectful sentiment. He digs deep to find these qualities in his opponents, even as he’s about to expose the emptiness, contradictions, and bankruptcy of their worldviews. In his own words:
We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity. We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.
Imagine if politicians and YouTube comments aimed their arguments at the best possible picture of their opponents rather than their vices?
Paradox
Even though I’m not familiar with all the philosophical schools Chesterton engages with, I can still appreciate how he engages with them. Chesterton is sometimes call the “prince of paradox,” and for good reason! Paradox drips off every page:
Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal
He may even go mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity.
Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world
The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world…a big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness.
The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties.
But, his best paradoxes are reserved for Nietzsche and his disciples (it’s notable that he doesn’t have an essay dedicated to Nietzsche–I suspect it’s because he doesn’t respect him enough to be able to write against him with sincerity and integrity). This school of thought believed in an “intensity of experience” that despised small and weak things (when a devastating earthquake struck, Nietzsche was overjoyed at the destruction of the weak: “Two hundred thousand wiped out at a stroke – how magnificent!”). Through paradox, Chesterton shows that Nietzsche’s “strength” is actually a lethal weakness.
The modern world, when it praises its little Caesars, talks of being strong and brave: but it does not seem to see the eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of these ideas. The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave.
Against his close friend George Bernard Shaw, he says
He has even been infected to some extent with the primary intellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle.
Chesterton sees true strength in romantic wonder, not in setting yourself as superior. The greatness of a man is not in how powerful he is, but in how often he weeps in joy and sorrow, lament and worship.
Romanticism
The most charming thing about these essays, even though I couldn’t understand all of them, is his vigorous romanticism. It’s not a romanticism in spite of the hard realities of the world, but a romanticism because of it.
Chesterton is a Romantic-Realist. Like the romantics, he views the world with a sense of wonder and awe. Adventure is around every corner, just waiting to send you off on a heroic journey where the divine is hiding behind every tree and underneath every rock. He is invigorated with life and hope because, unlike the other worldly-wise philosophers of his age (and all ages, really) he puts aside the trappings of a philosopher and becomes a child. His child-like wonder and faith is what makes him a great philosopher and a towering intellectual figure. He doesn’t see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but by bowing at their feet in reverence. He loves life not because he’s in control of it, but because he’s in awe of it.
However, Chesterton admits that most romantics writers and philosophers are merely shallow sentimentalists with a philosophy powerless to deal with the cruel realities of the world. So, like the realists, he discards the rose-colored glasses of other romanticists and comes to terms with the harshness of life. But, instead of arriving at this point and tearing down every sentimental and problematic ideal around him like Nietzsche, Chesterton turns to his ideals and his romanticism as part of the solution, as tools that are “deeper than reality” (here especially, you can hear the influence on C.S. Lewis!)
As befits the “prince of paradox,” his romantic awe and wonder about the world come about precisely because life is hard and cruel. In fact, the chaos of life creates this romanticism:
“The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect.”
It would be easy to misinterpret this as a sort of modern “growth mindset” where hardships are merely exciting opportunities for growth. But, unlike Carol Dweck and her wise-yet-ultimately-shallow mindset, Chesterton’s hope holds up even when things are actually, truly utterly hopeless. In fact, he says hope is only meaningful when there is no reason to hope:
“As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.”
By “Christian Virtues,” he’s referring to faith, hope, and charity. (Fellow Protestants might be surprised at the word charity instead of love. Charity is the traditional Catholic translation of the Greek agape in this context, and the translation was a point of bitter debate between reformer William Tyndale and Catholic Sir Thomas More. Neither of them were particularly loving or charitable to the other).
He adds more on the “unreasonableness” of these virtues:
“charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.”
His hope is real hope exactly because it is outlandish. His deep hope rejects surface-level sentimental religion as well as atheistic materialism. Instead, it is a deep Spiritual Romanticism which is not made less real and practical because it is spiritual and outlandish, but more real and more practical.