G. K. Chesterton

The Argument

G.K. Chesterton is the apologist who made orthodoxy the most dangerous and adventurous idea in the room, and he did it by demonstrating that the secular alternatives were not, as they claimed, more rational or more liberating — they were merely more boring. His method was paradox: the reversal that shows you that what you thought was simple is complex, that what you thought was progressive is reactionary, that what you thought was freedom is a new kind of prison.

Orthodoxy is his masterpiece — the autobiography of an intellectual conversion that takes the form of a sustained argument. He discovered, he says, that he had been slowly constructing a philosophy that turned out to be Christianity. Every position he had arrived at by reason turned out to be the position the tradition had held for two thousand years. This discovery did not make him feel that he had wasted his time. It made him feel that the tradition was smarter than he had thought.

For literary apologetics, Chesterton is the model of the writer who uses all of his literary gifts — the wit, the paradox, the image, the sustained argument — in the service of a theological position he holds with complete conviction. He demonstrated that the apologist does not have to be defensive, does not have to be timid, does not have to apologize for the tradition. He can attack, with joy, the assumptions of the age.