The Everlasting Man
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've committed to reading a shelf-full of books this year. I chose them from amongst the dozens -- aright, hundreds -- of books that we own that I've never read. I specifically asked myself, 'what are the books that I want to have read?'
I guess that's sort of my motto this year: what are the things that I want to have accomplished? I've learned that there are lots of things that I want to do and there is an altogether different set of things that I want to have done -- not in the passive sense of having them done to me, but in the past tense of having done them.
For me, reading has always fallen into this category.
I wasn't a reader growing up; and even though I attended an awesome liberal arts college (and got decent enough grades), I really didn't thrive academically because I didn't enjoy the act of sitting down and reading. In fact, it wasn't until graduate school that I felt like I ever totally committed to investing in a great book. One fall at University of Dallas, I literally spent a couple of hours every weeknight, holed up in the library, pouring over Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. I never calculated how many hours it added up to, but that was the first great work that I really came to delight in not only reading, but learning. Nevertheless, I have continued to be better at collecting books than at reading and digesting them.
Last fall I started a small reading group to help motivate me in reading books that I felt like I should be reading. This has proven to be extremely helpful. But for 2018 I wanted to take it a step further. So, to help me remain accountable and to also give me an outlet for processing what I'm reading, I decided to start blogging again. I've posted several times over the past few weeks, but I haven't written a word about what I'm reading. So, here goes...
The best advice about going to confession that I ever received is to confess the sins you're most afraid of first. That principle has proven incredibly helpful to me not only in the confessional but in other areas of life as well. If I have list of things to do I like to knock out the hardest one first and then it feels like the rest is a piece of cake.
That tells you a little something about how I chose to order my reading list. My first book for 2018 is G.K. Chesteron's great work, The Everlasting Man.
It's a book that has intimidated me for a while. All of my favorite authors and most of my favorite professors at Hillsdale and UD were huge fans. But, try as I might, I couldn't get into it. I bought a nice, early edition of it at a used book store sometime during college or graduate school but never muscled my way through it -- until now.
I'll be honest, it was tough sledding. If you haven't read Chesterton before, he can definitely be an acquired taste. His incredibly fertile imagination, his fun-loving passion for language, and his quick, good-natured wit make for delightful reading. But, his train of thought tends to flit about like a butterfly, to chase after tangents like an exuberant puppy after squirrels. As I plodded through, there were times I would finish a 40 page chapter and find myself thinking, he just made one point in that whole chapter, right? OK, good...
Don't get me wrong, I hold Chesterton in just about the highest regard, as far as great authors go. I just find him rather challenging. Regardless, it was an amazing read.
Obviously doing justice to one of the great works of Christian apologetics in a blog post is simply not going to happen. So, I think what I would like to do is simply share a few of the images and ideas that particularly fascinated and stood out to me. First, though, a bit of an introduction:
Chesteron's Everlasting Man (EM) was written in part as a response to the great novelist and secularist H.G. Wells's An Outline of History. His great friend and ally, Hilaire Belloc, took on Wells more directly and belligerently. Chesterton's response came in his typically playful yet profound fashion. He took on the assertions and assumptions of atheistic secular elites, turning them on their heads and shining the bright, winsome light of common sense upon them.
In the Outline, Wells trots out the materialist and secularist assumptions of human origins and pre-history -- pronouncing that man, having evolved from simpler creatures, is merely a clever ape. Instead of allowing the theory of evolution to be a scientific theory, Wells makes it an anthropological and philosophical theory the central tenet of which is the un-remarkable and un-exceptional nature of man.
One of the things that has always stood out to me about Chesterton is how incredibly well-read he is. He seems to have complete command of Western history, philosophy, art and literature, but also a robust mastery of the contemporary conversation. What sets him apart though is the freshness and youthfulness with which he engages both the tradition and the contemporary conversation.
In the first half, Chesterton gives us an overview of human history up to Christ. In it he tackles the assumptions of Wells and his peers by inviting the reader to step back and realize (like a child so naturally would) that human beings are actually something categorically different from animals.
Of course we know that there are several things that set us apart from animals, but in typically Chestertonian fashion, he latches on to something poetical: man's ability to create art, man's imagination, man's ability to be awed and inspired. He points out that the only definitive thing that we know about the cave man is that he was an artist, which is to say that he was reflective, awed, and inspired.
These perspectives of awe, reflection and inspiration are exactly the premise of the entire book. Chesterton says that the reason that there is so much doubt and skepticism about the faith is that we have grown overly accustomed to it, have domesticized it and grown to comfortable with it. What we really need is to discover it anew.
It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.
Insightfully, he suggests that the best thing for our post-Christian culture would be to discover Christianity anew as if it were something we had never encountered before.
The best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity would be a Christian, the next best judge would be more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.
This description is so incredibly apt and so incredibly prophetic -- it's almost staggering. I read this quote about three weeks ago and it is still staggering. Chesterton is literally describing the ennui, cynicism and disinterestedness of so many of the young people I've encountered in religious education classes. Tragically, for so many Christianity has become something so boring, beige and banal that they literally cannot even see it in front of their eyes.
The second half of the book is on Christ and discovering Him anew. Much as he invites us to rediscover who man is anew in the first half. He does the same thing with Christ in the second half.
In this rediscovery of the authentic Christ, Chesterton very powerful dismisses the domesticated reduction of Jesus as a mere ethicist or philosopher or as a proto-socialist political revolutionary.
All at once I could hear Dr. Peter Kreeft ranting against reductions of Jesus to a 'Pop Psychologist' and C.S. Lewis's "Tri-lema" of Jesus as Lord, Lunatic or Liar. Reading this book I was able to see just how incredibly foundational Chesterton has been for so many of my heroes: from Lewis and Tolkien to contemporary thinkers like Kreeft to my own mentors like Dr. Brad Birzer at Hillsdale, Dr. Mark Lowery at U.D. and others.
The more I read the more I realize that these great thinkers really did do a lot to advance our understanding of the world. I guess I've always sort of had this assumption -- maybe it's just me, I don't know -- that there aren't really any new ideas under the sun. But then I'll encounter someone like Chesterton and have to acknowledge that, actually, no one prior to him really ever saw things quite the way he did.
I guess the one thing that I would put my finger on as the most truly formative and lasting image I will take from Everlasting Man isn't a quote or a fact or even an idea. It's an impression, a sensibility. And, it's hard to describe. In a word, it's his innocence. When I read Chesterton I feel like I have permission to be simple -- to be trusting. It is something like an echo of St. Therese of Lisieux, whose "Little Way" said that we must become like little children so as to become sons and daughters of the Father. But instead of coming from a tiny, young, cloistered French Carmelite it's coming from an enormous, cheese and ale loving, book-devouring, jovial, lay Englishman.
Even though Chesterton was incredibly learned and and was perennially engaged in the loftiest debates of his day, I know of no authors who were more truly and more consistently a little child in his pure, joyful, aw-struck wonder at the beauty of the world, its creatures -- especially Man -- and its Creator and His Son.
I guess that's sort of my motto this year: what are the things that I want to have accomplished? I've learned that there are lots of things that I want to do and there is an altogether different set of things that I want to have done -- not in the passive sense of having them done to me, but in the past tense of having done them.
For me, reading has always fallen into this category.
I wasn't a reader growing up; and even though I attended an awesome liberal arts college (and got decent enough grades), I really didn't thrive academically because I didn't enjoy the act of sitting down and reading. In fact, it wasn't until graduate school that I felt like I ever totally committed to investing in a great book. One fall at University of Dallas, I literally spent a couple of hours every weeknight, holed up in the library, pouring over Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. I never calculated how many hours it added up to, but that was the first great work that I really came to delight in not only reading, but learning. Nevertheless, I have continued to be better at collecting books than at reading and digesting them.
Last fall I started a small reading group to help motivate me in reading books that I felt like I should be reading. This has proven to be extremely helpful. But for 2018 I wanted to take it a step further. So, to help me remain accountable and to also give me an outlet for processing what I'm reading, I decided to start blogging again. I've posted several times over the past few weeks, but I haven't written a word about what I'm reading. So, here goes...
The best advice about going to confession that I ever received is to confess the sins you're most afraid of first. That principle has proven incredibly helpful to me not only in the confessional but in other areas of life as well. If I have list of things to do I like to knock out the hardest one first and then it feels like the rest is a piece of cake.
That tells you a little something about how I chose to order my reading list. My first book for 2018 is G.K. Chesteron's great work, The Everlasting Man.
It's a book that has intimidated me for a while. All of my favorite authors and most of my favorite professors at Hillsdale and UD were huge fans. But, try as I might, I couldn't get into it. I bought a nice, early edition of it at a used book store sometime during college or graduate school but never muscled my way through it -- until now.
I'll be honest, it was tough sledding. If you haven't read Chesterton before, he can definitely be an acquired taste. His incredibly fertile imagination, his fun-loving passion for language, and his quick, good-natured wit make for delightful reading. But, his train of thought tends to flit about like a butterfly, to chase after tangents like an exuberant puppy after squirrels. As I plodded through, there were times I would finish a 40 page chapter and find myself thinking, he just made one point in that whole chapter, right? OK, good...
Don't get me wrong, I hold Chesterton in just about the highest regard, as far as great authors go. I just find him rather challenging. Regardless, it was an amazing read.
Obviously doing justice to one of the great works of Christian apologetics in a blog post is simply not going to happen. So, I think what I would like to do is simply share a few of the images and ideas that particularly fascinated and stood out to me. First, though, a bit of an introduction:
Chesteron's Everlasting Man (EM) was written in part as a response to the great novelist and secularist H.G. Wells's An Outline of History. His great friend and ally, Hilaire Belloc, took on Wells more directly and belligerently. Chesterton's response came in his typically playful yet profound fashion. He took on the assertions and assumptions of atheistic secular elites, turning them on their heads and shining the bright, winsome light of common sense upon them.
In the Outline, Wells trots out the materialist and secularist assumptions of human origins and pre-history -- pronouncing that man, having evolved from simpler creatures, is merely a clever ape. Instead of allowing the theory of evolution to be a scientific theory, Wells makes it an anthropological and philosophical theory the central tenet of which is the un-remarkable and un-exceptional nature of man.
One of the things that has always stood out to me about Chesterton is how incredibly well-read he is. He seems to have complete command of Western history, philosophy, art and literature, but also a robust mastery of the contemporary conversation. What sets him apart though is the freshness and youthfulness with which he engages both the tradition and the contemporary conversation.
In the first half, Chesterton gives us an overview of human history up to Christ. In it he tackles the assumptions of Wells and his peers by inviting the reader to step back and realize (like a child so naturally would) that human beings are actually something categorically different from animals.
Of course we know that there are several things that set us apart from animals, but in typically Chestertonian fashion, he latches on to something poetical: man's ability to create art, man's imagination, man's ability to be awed and inspired. He points out that the only definitive thing that we know about the cave man is that he was an artist, which is to say that he was reflective, awed, and inspired.
These perspectives of awe, reflection and inspiration are exactly the premise of the entire book. Chesterton says that the reason that there is so much doubt and skepticism about the faith is that we have grown overly accustomed to it, have domesticized it and grown to comfortable with it. What we really need is to discover it anew.
It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.
Insightfully, he suggests that the best thing for our post-Christian culture would be to discover Christianity anew as if it were something we had never encountered before.
The best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity would be a Christian, the next best judge would be more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.
This description is so incredibly apt and so incredibly prophetic -- it's almost staggering. I read this quote about three weeks ago and it is still staggering. Chesterton is literally describing the ennui, cynicism and disinterestedness of so many of the young people I've encountered in religious education classes. Tragically, for so many Christianity has become something so boring, beige and banal that they literally cannot even see it in front of their eyes.
The second half of the book is on Christ and discovering Him anew. Much as he invites us to rediscover who man is anew in the first half. He does the same thing with Christ in the second half.
In this rediscovery of the authentic Christ, Chesterton very powerful dismisses the domesticated reduction of Jesus as a mere ethicist or philosopher or as a proto-socialist political revolutionary.
All at once I could hear Dr. Peter Kreeft ranting against reductions of Jesus to a 'Pop Psychologist' and C.S. Lewis's "Tri-lema" of Jesus as Lord, Lunatic or Liar. Reading this book I was able to see just how incredibly foundational Chesterton has been for so many of my heroes: from Lewis and Tolkien to contemporary thinkers like Kreeft to my own mentors like Dr. Brad Birzer at Hillsdale, Dr. Mark Lowery at U.D. and others.
The more I read the more I realize that these great thinkers really did do a lot to advance our understanding of the world. I guess I've always sort of had this assumption -- maybe it's just me, I don't know -- that there aren't really any new ideas under the sun. But then I'll encounter someone like Chesterton and have to acknowledge that, actually, no one prior to him really ever saw things quite the way he did.
I guess the one thing that I would put my finger on as the most truly formative and lasting image I will take from Everlasting Man isn't a quote or a fact or even an idea. It's an impression, a sensibility. And, it's hard to describe. In a word, it's his innocence. When I read Chesterton I feel like I have permission to be simple -- to be trusting. It is something like an echo of St. Therese of Lisieux, whose "Little Way" said that we must become like little children so as to become sons and daughters of the Father. But instead of coming from a tiny, young, cloistered French Carmelite it's coming from an enormous, cheese and ale loving, book-devouring, jovial, lay Englishman.
Even though Chesterton was incredibly learned and and was perennially engaged in the loftiest debates of his day, I know of no authors who were more truly and more consistently a little child in his pure, joyful, aw-struck wonder at the beauty of the world, its creatures -- especially Man -- and its Creator and His Son.
G.K. Chesterton, Pray for us!
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