By JEFF MINICK
Knight Of The Holy Ghost: A Short History of G.K. Chesterton, by Dale Ahlquist; Ignatius Press/Augustine Institute, 2018, 191 pages. Order at Ignatius.com.
For admirers of wit and aphorism, reading Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) can be a dangerous pastime.
Chesterton throws off one-liners as happily and as generously as a Santa Claus tossing peppermint candy to children during a Christmas parade. Indeed, two fat volumes — The Quotable Chesterton and More Quotable Chesterton — attest to this aphoristic talent. Every page in a Chesterton essay, many times every paragraph, tempts the reader to write down one or two of his shining sentences. Of course, the reader who yielded to that temptation would in essence become a Chestertonian amanuensis, copying out the better part of the book or essay.
In Knight Of The Holy Ghost: A Short History of G.K. Chesterton (Ignatius Press/Augustine Institute, 2018, 191 pages), Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, offers several of these quotations near the beginning of his excellent biography. Here is just a sampling:
“The spirit of the age is very often the worst enemy of the age.”
“A dead thing can go with the stream, only a living thing can go against it.”
“Freedom of speech means practically in our modern civilization that we must only talk about unimportant things.”
On Mary Queen of Scots: “She was executed for being in good health.”
“A politician with a future means a politician with a forgotten past.”
“Politicians do not act; they pose.”
Here are two of Chesterton’s most famous quotations, both of which have long been favorites of mine. The first reminds me to laugh at myself, the second to find pleasure and joy in being an amateur and trying new things.
“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
For those familiar with Chesterton and his work, Knight of the Holy Ghost will be familiar territory. For newcomers to terra Chestertonia, however, and those of us who have some middling knowledge of his work — I have read and taught some of the Father Brown stories, and years ago explored Orthodoxy, but these constitute only a fraction of what he wrote — Ahlquist’s biography is a splendid introduction both to the man and to his writing.
Ahlquist divides his history of Chesterton into three parts: “The Man,” “The Writer,” and “The Saint?” In the first, we meet one of the happiest of literary eccentrics, a man who found joy in the mundane and who brought that zest for life onto every page he wrote. In his time, Chesterton was famed for such attributes as his portly frame (During World War I, a woman asked Chesterton why he wasn’t “out at the Front,” to which he replied, “If you go round to the side, you will see that I am”), his sometimes outlandish attire, his ability to focus intensely on his writing but to bungle train schedules and appointments, and his quips.
Once the town officials of Beaconsfield, where Chesterton then made his home, paid him a call to inform him they had elected him constable. “He told them that he could not fulfill the duties of a constable since one of those duties was to suppress local riots, and he was afraid he would be on the side of the rioters.”
Not all of Chesterton’s life was sunshine and roses. His brother Cecil died of wounds and disease just after the end of the First World War, and Chesterton’s beloved spouse, Frances, to the regret of husband and wife, could not bear children. The suicide of her brother also brought a dark period to their marriage.
Both friends and intellectual enemies revered Chesterton for his many kindnesses and his consideration for others. Personalities as different as Fulton Sheen and Aldous Huxley attended his funeral. Writer Walter de la Mare originally dubbed him “Knight of the Holy Ghost,” and Ahlquist elaborates on this title:
“From beginning to end, Chesterton was characterized as a knight. In the farewell poem (Walter de la Mare’s tribute on the memorial card), he is portrayed as still at battle, still going his way, still paradoxical, for his fool’s attire is actually wisdom, his joke is actually the truth, and the fight is a delight. The devil doesn’t get the joke. The dragon can’t be taken seriously. The knight, ever of good humor, is at peace, his heart at rest because it is compassionate and pure. And, even today, he is still lovable, which is why people still love him. Still truthful, which is why he is still controversial.
“Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way. One of his earliest books was The Wild Knight, and he will always be associated with its title character, who says: “I ride forever, seeking after God.”
As a writer, Chesterton brought to the world a whirlwind of words. He produced more than 100 books, 1,500 pages of poetry, and over 5,000 essays for newspapers and magazines. In “The Writer,” Ahlquist looks at five of Chesterton’s most important books, discusses some of his verse, including the short lovely poem, The Donkey and the classic The Ballad of the White Horse, sketches out his career as a journalist, and ends with some insights into the Father Brown stories, Chesterton’s most widely read work.
Though he did not convert to Catholicism until 1922, for many years prior to that date elements of the Catholic faith entered into Chesterton’s work, even those essays he wrote for the papers and literary journals. He wrote Orthodoxy, now a Catholic classic, years before his conversion, and in his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas he brilliantly summarizes the Summa Theologiae in one chapter. (It was Frances, by the way, who led Chesterton back to Anglicanism, and it was Chesterton who then led her to Catholicism, her conversion following his by four years.)
In “The Saint?,” the third and final chapter of his biography, Ahlquist makes a case for G.K. Chesterton as saint. He brings several arguments to this proposal. He points, for example, to the number of people whom Chesterton helped bring to the Church, souls ranging from Evelyn Waugh to Sigrid Undset, from actor Alec Guinness to historian Christopher Dawson, and from those still among the living, men and women of our own day like television host Laura Ingraham, teacher and writer Peter Kreeft, and biographer Joseph Pearce.
“There are hundreds of names on the list,” Ahlquist tells us, “and it features an amazing variety from all walks of life, all disciplines, all different denominations….I’m on the list, too.” Though he remained an Anglican, C.S. Lewis was also moved by the writings of Chesterton as Lewis journeyed from atheism to Christianity.
At the end of Knight of the Holy Ghost, Dale Ahlquist writes “. . . when we admire Chesterton and his great genius and his enormous creative talents, we are being thankful for God’s gifts, God’s gifts to Chesterton, God’s gifts to us through Chesterton. Everything points to God. And this is what saints do: They point us to God.”
With Knight of the Holy Ghost, Ahlquist points us to Chesterton. His biography should inspire readers, as it has your reviewer, to seek out more of this remarkable man’s essays and books.
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