Who Was G.K. Chesterton?
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He trained as an illustrator before turning to journalism and quickly became one of the most prolific and widely read writers of his era, producing newspaper columns, literary criticism, biography, poetry, detective fiction (most famously the Father Brown stories), and Christian apologetics in roughly equal abundance. His early religious position drifted toward a kind of practical agnosticism, but a sustained engagement with the implications of materialism led him, by his own account, back toward belief – first to a robust Anglican Christianity, articulated in Orthodoxy (1908), and eventually, in 1922, to Roman Catholicism.
The Everlasting Man (1925) was written substantially as a response to H.G. Wells's The Outline of History, which had presented human civilization and the figure of Christ as a seamless continuation of animal development – one more episode in a long evolutionary story with no genuine breaks. Chesterton's book argues instead that both man and Christ represent genuine discontinuities: man is not merely a clever animal but something qualitatively different from the rest of creation, and Christ is not merely one more wise teacher in a sequence of wise teachers but something the sequence itself cannot produce. C.S. Lewis later credited The Everlasting Man with showing him, for the first time, the entire shape of the Christian account of history.
Chesterton is significant for TLA because he is, among the authors on this site, one of the few who states the site's central distinction in almost exactly its own terms, decades in advance. Where Wells's evolutionary account treats the emergence of man, and the emergence of Christ, as continuous developments – better descriptions of revolution than of rupture – Chesterton insists on a break: something new entering the story from outside its existing terms, not merely a more advanced version of what was already there. He died in 1936.
In Their Own Words
“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.”
– attributed“Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.”
– The Everlasting Man, 1925“We are all Catholics now.”
– The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908Selected Bibliography
- Heretics – 1905
- Orthodoxy – 1908
- The Man Who Was Thursday – 1908
- The Everlasting Man – 1925
- St. Francis of Assisi – 1923