When G. K. Chesterton died in 1936, the obituary in the Manchester Guardian dismissed the description of him as a philosopher as “very ill-chosen”. He had, rather, “a profusion of fresh and original ideas, but they owed more to the spontaneous inspirations of an enormously zestful temperament than to continuous or connected thought”. To this anonymous obituary, his friend Hilaire Belloc replied six days later in the Observer, with the view that “The intellectual side of him has been masked for many and for some hidden by his delight in the exercise of words and especially in the comedy of words”. The most sustained defence of “the intellectual side” of GKC remains Hugh Kenner’s classic short exposition, Paradox in Chesterton (1948). Since then, there has been a steady stream of books, usually by Roman Catholics, more or less ploddingly demonstrating Chesterton’s orthodoxy ”“ which is a different exercise from winkling out the peculiar charms of his playful mind.
Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy painstakingly follows the development of GK’s ideas from the schoolboy poet and debater of the 1880s to the author of Orthodoxy in 1908. William Oddie’s book demonstrates, sometimes with a little too much bluster, that although Chesterton did not actually become a Roman Catholic until 1922, his “position” as a robust defender of Catholic Orthodoxy was well in place fifteen years earlier. It is also Oddie’s intention to demonstrate that Chesterton absorbed many of his Catholic ideas not, as might previously have been supposed, from his friend Belloc, nor from Fr O’Connor, the model for Father Brown, but from his Anglo-Catholic wife Frances Blogg, and from some of her high-church heroes, most notably Charles Gore, Conrad Noel and Percy Dearmer.
Read it all.
The Paradox Who Was G.K. Chesterton
When G. K. Chesterton died in 1936, the obituary in the Manchester Guardian dismissed the description of him as a philosopher as “very ill-chosen”. He had, rather, “a profusion of fresh and original ideas, but they owed more to the spontaneous inspirations of an enormously zestful temperament than to continuous or connected thought”. To this anonymous obituary, his friend Hilaire Belloc replied six days later in the Observer, with the view that “The intellectual side of him has been masked for many and for some hidden by his delight in the exercise of words and especially in the comedy of words”. The most sustained defence of “the intellectual side” of GKC remains Hugh Kenner’s classic short exposition, Paradox in Chesterton (1948). Since then, there has been a steady stream of books, usually by Roman Catholics, more or less ploddingly demonstrating Chesterton’s orthodoxy ”“ which is a different exercise from winkling out the peculiar charms of his playful mind.
Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy painstakingly follows the development of GK’s ideas from the schoolboy poet and debater of the 1880s to the author of Orthodoxy in 1908. William Oddie’s book demonstrates, sometimes with a little too much bluster, that although Chesterton did not actually become a Roman Catholic until 1922, his “position” as a robust defender of Catholic Orthodoxy was well in place fifteen years earlier. It is also Oddie’s intention to demonstrate that Chesterton absorbed many of his Catholic ideas not, as might previously have been supposed, from his friend Belloc, nor from Fr O’Connor, the model for Father Brown, but from his Anglo-Catholic wife Frances Blogg, and from some of her high-church heroes, most notably Charles Gore, Conrad Noel and Percy Dearmer.
Read it all.