Take Chesterton’s “Way of Wonder” to Jesus

A great writer changes my life. G.K. Chesterton converted me (through Grace) to the Catholic Faith. Dale Ahlquist’s new book Way of Wonder: Wisdom from G.K. Chesterton is a masterful collection of rare quotes and excerpts from this titan of English literature.

The chapter titles of his new book are not subjects we encounter much in the media these days:
Wonder; Innocence; Goodness; Purity; Faith, Hope, and Charity; The Christian Ideal; Everyday Holiness; and Joy: the Gigantic Secret of the Christian.

“When Men Stop Believing in God…They Believe in Anything”

He often writes of the devastation of man when he abandons God. His answer is to return to the Lord and the things of God–reverence, gratitude, wonder, sacrifice, and family. The basic simple, and common, and traditional things.

He wrote a hundred books, 4000 essays, and over 200 poems. His masterpieces include The Everlasting Man (a short history of the Western World centered on Christ. My personal favorite), St. Francis of Assisi (my second favorite), and Orthodoxy. At his death, Pope Pius XI called him “a gifted defender of the Faith.”

Chesterton the Pro-lifer

He was always strict about Catholic doctrine and very pro-life. He spoke strongly against abortion, contraception, and suicide when they were just outliers on the horizon. Some of this is evinced by the glory he saw in babies and children in a few of these quotes.

Chesterton and Conversion

Ahlquist was converted by Chesterton, as he was a linchpin in my own conversion–the greatest event of my life. But before that radiant day, I was still questioning the divinity of Jesus. Then I heard this Chesterton quote describing Jesus on Ahlquist’s EWTN-TV show G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense:

[A]n extraordinary being who would certainly have seemed as mad in one century as another, who makes a vague and vast claim to divinity, who constantly contradicts himself, who imposes impossible commands, who where he seems wrong to us would certainly have seemed quite as wrong to anybody else, who where he seems right to us is often in tune with matters not ancient but modern, such, for instance, as the adoration of children. For some of his utterances men might fairly call him a maniac; for others, men long centuries afterwards might justly call him a prophet. But what nobody can possibly call him is a Galilean of the time of Tiberius.

It was so true! Jesus does seem almost to be speaking to modern man more than ancient Israel. And the amazing things he did and said are not things done by just some Jew of the First Century. They are vastly more, infinitely more. He raised people from the dead; He Himself resurrected from the dead. His sayings alone are far more than those of a mere mortal; they are the words of “incalculable intelligence,” to borrow a phrase from Fr. George Rutler. They can only be described as divine.

After a lifetime of searching for the truth, I had finally found the Truth.

I was on my way home.

Chesterton himself, (1874-1936) converted in 1922. He influenced the conversions of Joseph Pearce, Graham Greene, Sir Alec Guinness, and many others. “C.S. Lewis was an atheist until he read Chesterton’s book, The Everlasting Man, but he wasn’t afterward,” [he became Anglican] writes Ahlquist, “prompting him to observe that a young man who is serious about his atheism cannot be too careful about what he reads.”

Chesterton’s Way of Wonder

After reading Chesterton for nine years, I am still intoxicated by his insights, his sense of wonder at all things, and the beauty of his language.

Ahlquist’s other three Chesterton books are masterful compendiums of the prolific writer’s works. G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense is an exemplary starter book.

Here are some of these quotes to inspire, startle, and edify you—maybe even convert one or two of you. Take Chesterton’s way of wonder to “the way, the truth, and the life.” To “the Christ, the Son of the Living God:”

1. “Within every one of these children’s heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs, there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.”

2. “Men live…rejoicing—from age to age in something fresher than progress—with the fact that with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made.”

3. “Babies are the most beautiful things on earth.”

4. “A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.”

5. “Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm because they are afraid to look back.”

6. “The whole difference between philosophy and religion is expressed in this: it is the difference between the very small section of people who can understand things and the very large number who can enjoy them.”

7. “The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live.”

8, “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.”

9. “Modern men have utterly lost the joy of life. They have to put up with the miserable substitute of the joy of life. And even these they seem less and less able to enjoy. Unless we can make ordinary men interested in ordinary life, we are under the vulgar despotism of those who cannot interest them, but can at least amuse them. Unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labor interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilization a fatigue, which is the one disease from which civilizations do not recover. So died the great Pagan civilization; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.”

10. “Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

11. “There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.”

12. God himself will not help us to ignore evil, but only to defy and to defeat it.”

13. “It’s easy to be solemn, it is so hard to be frivolous.”

14. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.”

15. “The woman works because she has asked the man to work and he has refused.”

16. “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

17. “For the march of scientific progress has brought us only to this: for we have to ask for things that are homely as if they were heroic virtues…This is the modern achievement: that a human being may yet suffer in order to remain a sane man as a man once suffered to be a saint or martyr.”

18. “Men rush toward complexity, but they yearn toward simplicity. They try to be kings, but dream of being shepherds.”

19. “The most interesting ideas are those which the newspapers dismiss as dogmas.”

20. “Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things. Nay, they are more extraordinary.”

21. “The Faith gives a man back his body, and his soul, and his reason, and his will, and his very life…The man who has received it receives all the old human functions that all the other philosophies are already taking away.”

22. “St. Francis…was above all things a great giver, and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance—a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks, and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact of existence if we realize that but for some strange mercy we should not even exist.”

23. “The art of defending any of the cardinal virtues today has all the exhilaration of a vice.

24. “It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young.”

25. “Children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

26. “Man is never genuinely home except in goodness.”