C.S. Lewis famously credited G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man as a key step in his turn from atheism to Christian faith. The book audaciously surveyed the broad sweep of human history, then zeroed in on the Incarnation of Christ. How, Chesterton asked, could such a mysterious and startling event come to be known as the center point of history? And how did this intellectual mystic offer a fresh path into this story for so many? 

In conjunction with the release of our Christmas Trinity Forum Reading, The Strangest Story in the World, we delved into this iconic work with one of the world’s leading Chesterton scholars, Dale Ahlquist. Both the Reading and this conversation helped us to prepare ourselves for the Incarnation during the Advent season – and to go deeper with Chesterton on the eve of the 100th anniversary of The Everlasting Man.

• Reflection: What aspect of Dale’s remarks or the conversation was most compelling to you and why?
• Chesterton’s work The Everlasting Man encourages the reader to look at the Incarnation with fresh eyes, and emphasizes how strange it is – indeed, he calls it “the strangest story in the world.” What, in his view, makes the story of Christ so strange?.  Why does Chesterton emphasize the weirdness and wonder of the Incarnation? Do you find his argument compelling? Why or why not?
• What does Chesterton see as the importance of imagination? How can one’s imagination be developed?
• What does Dale describe as “The Chesterton Option” for faithful public engagement? Do you find it a compelling model? What would it look like in the context of your life? How did Chesterton combine localism with engagement with the “big questions” of his time? Do you find his model contradictory or paradoxical?

Cherie Harder:  So glad to be with you all for today’s Online Conversation with Dale Ahlquist on “The Strangest Story Ever Told: G. K. Chesterton and the Incarnation.” We’re delighted that so many of you have joined us today. I believe we have well over 1,500 people registered from all over the world, and just want to thank you for the honor of your time and attention in joining us today. I’d like to send a special welcome and thank you to our nearly 150 first-time registrants for today’s Online Conversation, as well as our international guests joining us from all over the world. So if you haven’t already done so, drop us a note in the chat box. Let us know where you’re joining us from. And welcome from across the miles and across the time zones.

And if you are one of those people joining us for the very first time or are otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we work to cultivate, curate, and disseminate the best of Christian thought leadership and offer a place where leaders can wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith. And we hope today will be a small taste of that for you.

A hundred years ago, in 1925, the art and literary critic, philosopher, journalist, and wildly prolific author G. K. Chesterton published his most important work, The Everlasting Man. It was an unusual work by an even more unusual man on what he called “the strangest story ever told,” the weird, wild, and wonder-filled account of the incarnation. It was a book that Evelyn Waugh called a “permanent monument,” and that set a young atheist named C. S. Lewis on a path to Christian faith.

In the years after Chesterton’s death in 1936, interest in his work initially waned, but has since experienced a renaissance as more and more people have been attracted to and intrigued by Chesterton’s wit, wisdom, and humor in casting new light on the story of the light of the world. It’s part of the reason that we made our Christmas reading this year at Trinity Forum a reissue of “The Strangest Story Ever Told,” excerpts from Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. And it seemed fitting to have an Online Conversation during this Advent season to better explore the mystery of the incarnation, as well as Chesterton the man himself, to better know and love he whose birthday we celebrate later this month.

So I’m so pleased to get to introduce our guest today, Dale Ahlquist. Dale has been called the greatest living authority on the life and work of G. K. Chesterton. He’s the president of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the creator and host of the EWTN series “G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense” and publisher of Gilbert magazine. He is also the author of six books, including G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense, and the editor of 14 more books, all Chesterton related. He’s also the senior fellow of the Chesterton Library in London, and has given more than 900 lectures at universities, conferences, and other institutions, including Yale, Columbia, the Vatican, even the House of Lords. And he has sought to teach a new generation to know and love Chesterton’s work and thought, and thus co-founded the Chesterton Academy, a Catholic classical high school in Minnesota which has since become the flagship school of the Chesterton Schools Network, which now includes high schools from all around the world.

Dale, welcome.

Dale Ahlquist: Thank you. Cherie, it’s a great pleasure and honor to be with you today.

Cherie Harder: Well, we’re really excited to have you here. And, of course, starting out, just listening to your background, this is not— you did not start out as a Chesterton scholar. You and I talked yesterday and you’d actually, one of your early jobs in DC was in government relations. How did you come to be such a fan of Chesterton? How did you first encounter him? And why did his life, work, and thought make such an impact on yours?

Dale Ahlquist: Well, I started reading Chesterton right after I graduated from college, and I started with the book that we’re going to be discussing today, The Everlasting Man. And I started with that book because I knew what an influence it was on C. S. Lewis. I was a big C. S. Lewis fan, and it was my attempt to get behind C. S. Lewis, to figure out what helped make him tick. And when I read that book, I felt like I had just wasted four years of college. I felt like my whole education had been a sham, because here was clearly the deepest and widest thinker that I’d ever encountered, who had really provided an answer for all the skeptics and agnostics and lowlifes that I had been assigned to read in college. You know, I clearly only got one side of the story. And Chesterton had the answer to all these questions. But I also realized that I was encountering for the first time what I call a complete thinker, someone who had it all together. He wasn’t just focused on one idea, but could write about everything with just great adeptness and alacrity and, you know, someone who had things connected well.

And I realized I was not understanding everything I was reading, but at the same time I could not get enough. I wanted more. And so I—this is back in 1981—I started combing used bookstores to find more Chesterton and was wondering, how did this guy disappear? Why had I never heard of him? And was I the only one reading him? And I continued to follow that passion, get a hold of as much Chesterton as I could, and ended up doing a master’s degree thesis on Chesterton. And it was an interest that became a passion that finally just took over my life, to the point where I made the decision to devote myself full-time to promoting a greater understanding and exposition of G. K. Chesterton.

Cherie Harder: Yes. Well, you have written a guide to G. K. Chesterton’s masterpiece, The Everlasting Man. And, really, I guess The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy are probably seen as his two greatest contributions. And in The Everlasting Man, he definitely takes for himself the project of trying to make us see the story of the incarnation with fresh eyes, and points out just how strange it is. Maybe you could walk us through, since you’ve written the guide to this, how he tries to do this, why he argues that in many ways one has a better view of what Christianity is if one is completely outside it without any familiarity at all. Why would that be?

Dale Ahlquist: Well, I should start by saying that Chesterton is always trying to get us to look at things with fresh eyes. That’s really one of his techniques. And that’s why he uses the technique of paradox to just give you a twist on things so that you say, well, wait, that doesn’t sound right. And then you realize that it is right. And he’s inspired by many things when he takes that approach, but part of it is just the wonder of existence, the fact that we don’t deserve to be alive, we don’t deserve this life that we’ve been given. And so the right way to live is to live full of thanks and appreciation and a sense of wonder. To look out the window each day as if the world had been created just that day. To see all the familiar things that you’re used to seeing, but to see them as a stranger might see them, to see them for the first time. That’s his technique. That’s what he is trying to do.

And so he applies that to the great story of Christ, to the thing that so many people think they already know. They think they understand Christianity, but generally they only know the part that they’re closest to. And that’s usually what they’re reacting against. And they think that that’s all that Christianity is, that one thing that they’ve been exposed to. Chesterton gets us to move back, to see it from as great a distance as possible, to see the whole thing for what it is, and to look at it as a stranger might look at it, as someone who’s never heard of it, who is seeing it for the first time, and then to realize what a strange and unique thing it is. It’s not what you expected. And that’s the plot of the book, as it were.

Cherie Harder: Yes. Well, one thing about the plot of the book that’s so interesting is, you know, for a book that’s really about kind of inviting us to see the incredible story of the incarnation with fresh eyes, it sort of takes him a while to get there. The first two-thirds of the book is sort of this unconventional take on world history, including a somewhat dizzying historical tour through unusual, shall we say, historical categories involving myths and demons and the like. Why does Chesterton choose this approach to helping us see the incarnation more clearly?

Dale Ahlquist: Well, you know, Cherie, if you think about it, the Bible is written the same way. The first two-thirds are hard to get through. And then things really start happening when Jesus comes in the New Testament. And I think, without intending to, Chesterton lays out his book the same way as the Bible. It’s BC and AD. It’s everything leading up to Christ and then everything coming from Christ. But in order to get us there, to that hinge of history where everything changes, he sets up what a problem the world has gotten itself into. And, you know, starting from the earliest things that we know.

And Chesterton starts out in the cave. He starts out with the first humans. And, you know, he’s not writing it for someone who knows the Bible story. So he’s telling it a different way. So he’s going to start with the caveman. Well, what is the one thing we know about the caveman? What’s the only thing we know about the caveman? There’s only one thing we know. Chesterton says everything else is speculation. We don’t really know what he looked like. We don’t know what his marital habits were or really what he ate, or how he dressed, or how he combed his supposedly full head of hair. The only thing we know about him is that he was an artist. That’s the one thing we know, because the pictures that he drew on the cave wall are still there for us to see. And he starts out by saying, look, man is different from every other creature. No other creature paints on the wall. And there’s this artistic thing in man that sets him apart from the animals.

And then we’re going to tell the story of man. What do we know about civilization? Well, that the first thing we know about civilization is that it was civilized. He says the curtain goes up on a play that’s already in progress. We don’t know anything about history before history. We can only start with what history has told us, which is the recorded account of the human world. And so he takes what we really know. We know that early man was an artist. We know that civilization became civilized. We don’t know anything about before civilization. And in that early civilization, what is there? There is religion. There is philosophy. And there are the dark arts. There is a belief in a positive form of evil. And those are— and then, of course, the belief in God. So he follows these four threads and watches how they all wind together and how they lead up to the coming of Christ. It’s a completely unique and fresh approach to world history.

Cherie Harder: You know, one of the things that seems like Chesterton really emphasizes, even by calling this “the strangest story in the world,” is the weirdness of it. Why is the strangeness of the story so important to Chesterton, and why should it be important to us?

Dale Ahlquist: Well, you know, he’s setting up a story that man is looking for something. That’s what the myths are. The pagans are looking for something. He says “the natural is looking for the supernatural.” That’s the search that is being told in that pre-Christian period. There’s a belief in many gods. There’s only one tribe that has preserved the one god. But what that one tribe does that has preserved the one God, hasn’t done, is they haven’t developed philosophy. It’s the pagans that develop philosophy, and philosophy and religion come together for the first time, you know, when Jesus comes.

Why is that so strange? Because the spiritual life and the intellectual life have finally run into each other and in a big way. And how does it come? It comes in the most unexpected way possible. If you were God, Cherie, and you wanted to reveal yourself to the whole world, how would you do it? Well, naturally, Cherie, you’d come as a baby, wouldn’t you? You know, no one could expect that God is going to visit this planet in the form of one of his own helpless creatures? And that when that baby grows, his story gets even stranger. When he starts talking about eternal truths, he doesn’t say anything that is really the expected thing to say. And he uses imagery that’s new. And his understanding of basic relationships such as marriage and worship, again, unusual not for its time, but for all time. This is someone— someone timeless has come into time. And then what happens to him? He gets put to death. Try to look at this as if you’re seeing it for the first time and then you’ll see it’s strange. God comes as a baby, starts talking, says a lot of weird stuff, and then gets put to death.

Cherie Harder: It boggles the mind. It stretches the imagination. And, actually, speaking of the imagination, this is a huge theme of Chesterton. Chesterton himself said that his imagination was really impacted by George MacDonald. Probably Chesterton’s interest in MacDonald spurred C.S. Lewis to start reading George MacDonald as well. And Chesterton believed that imagination was actually the most important element of education, which is also not intuitive necessarily. And that’s something that I’ve noticed that you have picked up even in your creation of different schools within the Chesterton Academy. And one of the things you said at one point was that the people who neglect their powers of imagination become both passive and restless and ultimately dependent, dependent on other people to entertain them and to fill their minds because they’re unable to fill up themselves with something more nourishing. This is a description or a diagnosis that seems to really affect a lot of us, so much so that we are completely filled with trivialities and perhaps unable to even wrestle or comprehend the strangest story in the world. How would Chesterton advise us to develop our imagination such that we have the capacity to apprehend as well as love the great stories?

Dale Ahlquist: Well, our loss of imagination is a sign of decadence. And one of the points of The Everlasting Man is that we get to watch the decadence of civilization, how it happened. And one of the reasons that it decayed was that people became passive. They stopped being able to be amused. They stopped being able to be thrilled and be entertained and they had to start, as Chesterton says, “stabbing their eyes”—you know, just a horrible image—stabbing their eyes in order to have any sensation. When a civilization becomes deadened, it starts falling apart. And when you read his account of the downfall of the Roman civilization, you read that and you’re struck by how much it sounds like our society today. And the only way it can be rejuvenated is through the Creator himself, who can re-create, which is what “recreation” is supposed to be, is “re-creation.” And it’s an act of discipline to exercise our imagination.

Chesterton is a master at doing it, and he’s a master at pointing it out in in others. So that’s why you hear him laud the great works of, say, Charles Dickens or Shakespeare or George MacDonald, because these are masterpieces of the imagination. And we get to enter these worlds that are created worlds, created by humans, in the world of fiction and literature, and things are alive on a double basis because we’re not only in this world, but we’re in this world of imagination. We could be in two worlds at once. And of course, C.S. Lewis picked up on that, and Tolkien picked up on that as well.

But the thing about literature is that your mind is working at it while you’re reading it, because you have to create those images yourself. You have to jockey them up yourselves. When you’re sitting back watching a movie, you don’t have to do that anymore. Everything’s being done for you. And, you know, it’s amazing how the most vivid art form in all of history, which is the motion picture, has deadened our imaginations. It’s had the opposite effect on the audience that a piece of literature does. And Chesterton actually warned about that. He warned about decadence is when we stop doing things for ourselves. We stop fighting for ourselves. We stop entertaining ourselves. We stop ruling ourselves. And we stop thinking for ourselves.

Cherie Harder: Wow. It’s a lot to think about there. A lot to chew on. But, you know, one of the things you have pointed out quite a bit is that Chesterton was a real master of paradox. And one paradox that sort of occurs to me is it’s unusual to think about someone who is deeply imaginative, much less an intellectual mystic, who would also be commonsensical. But you have literally written a book calling Chesterton “the apostle of common sense.” How so?

Dale Ahlquist: Yeah, so common sense is, what Chesterton says, he says it’s that extinct branch of psychology. The things that we all know to be true, that we’ve somehow forgotten until someone points them out to us. And too much of modern intellectual development has been an attack on common sense. An attack on those truths that most everyone holds in common are suddenly thrown into question, and are then thrown out altogether, so that we are literally enacting laws that contradict our common sense. And Chesterton, in a most refreshing way, brings these things back to us. And that’s why he’s such a joy to read because, you know, he has these great quotations, as you’re well aware, Cherie, and anyone who’s picked up Chesterton. He can encapsulate a truth in just one sentence, and you recognize it to be true.

For instance, when he says, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it’s been found difficult and left untried.” You think, yeah, that’s absolutely right. Or when he says, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and to love our enemies, generally because they’re the same person.” Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Or when he tells you, he says, “We don’t argue about what things we call evil. We argue about which evils we call excusable.” So in other words, everyone knows what’s right and wrong. But what they start arguing about is, well, how much of this wrong can we make acceptable? Everyone knows that to be true. As soon as you hear him say that, you go, yeah, that’s right. And he has a way of doing that. Back when he says, you know, truth, of course, is stranger than fiction. Why? Because we’ve made fiction to suit ourselves.

Cherie Harder: Switching gears just a little bit, I want to ask you about what you’ve called the “Chesterton Option.” And part of the reason I’d like to ask you about this is one of our areas of focus here at the Trinity Forum is exploring models of faithful, God-honoring, public engagement. So, you know, when Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option came out, we hosted Rod to talk about the Benedict Option. Alan Jacobs actually proposed for the first time ever on an Online Conversation what he called the Gandalf Option, which was based on Gandalf’s telling, I think it was Denethor, he said, “I’m not here to rule. I’m here to try to nourish and care for all the good things that I find in the world, because I am a steward.” So that stewardship model. But you’ve proposed something slightly different, which you called the Chesterton Option of public engagement. What is the Chesterton Option?

Dale Ahlquist: Well, you know, first of all, the Chesterton Option would certainly draw on both the Benedict Option and this Gandalf Option that you’re telling us about. It certainly draws on both of those things. The idea that the world right now is a very messy and confused place. And there are no top-down solutions. There are only bottom-up solutions. We have to start making decisions and changes at the local level by changing the things that we can control. And then that change will then start spreading throughout society on a grassroots level. And so it starts with people doing things for themselves. The way they spend their money is a moral choice. You know, if you want to change your community, keep your dollars local. Don’t give it to the organization that takes your dollars out of the community. Support your neighbor rather than the big-chain store. Invest in local business and local opportunities rather than a distant stock market, for instance. Keep things local.

The most local thing of all is the family. If you take care of your family, if you nourish your family, then that has a ripple effect on other families. The most important part of life is lived within the home and not outside of the home. And the modern world has that completely opposite. They think all the action is outside the walls of the home. And that’s where the freedom is, and that’s where the expression is. No, all of the great freedoms and all of the great events of life are inside the home. And, you know, that’s where life and death is supposed to happen. And Chesterton calls the family “the only state that creates and loves its own citizens.” The only state that creates and loves its own citizens. If we can take care of our families, we can have a strong society. If we don’t take care of our families, we’ll have a very weak society.

So we call it localism, or a family-based economy. Chesterton says keep your politician close enough so you can kick him. The things that most directly affect you, you should be in control of. The church calls it subsidiarity. At the same time, along with subsidiarity, there is solidarity. In other words, you share these values and virtues with a group of people so that you’re doing it together. That’s what the church is supposed to do. That’s how you change a society. That’s the Chesterton Option.

Cherie Harder: Yes. Well, I mean, let me ask you about that, because there’s an interesting paradox between the Chesterton Option and the way that Chesterton often engaged publicly, in that he did address the biggest issues of all time. He mixed it up with some of the other leading national intellectuals of his time. And, interestingly, he sort of did it in a way where he often became friends with them. I’m thinking about H. G. Wells, an atheist-socialist, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and others with whom he was pretty direct and confrontational in terms of debating a lot of their ideas. I think he gave H. G. Wells—or maybe no, it was George Bernard Shaw—an entire chapter in his book Heretics. But he did—

Dale Ahlquist: He’s got a chapter. Wells got a chapter and he’s got a chapter.

Cherie Harder: There we go. But it’s sort of interesting in that he did often become friends with his antagonist, and even enduring friendships. And so I wanted to ask you about that. First of all, how did he manage to do that? Secondly, why did he manage to do that, given the seeming paradox between the emphasis on kind of the local versus the national or international? And then finally, should he have done that? And part of the reason I asked that is, you know, many of these folks had really poisonous ideas. H. G. Wells was a eugenicist. There’s real darkness there. And yet Chesterton managed to sustain a relationship with him, even despite the fact that he really was very much opposed to the idea. So, yes, we’d love your thoughts on how, why, and should he have done this?

Dale Ahlquist: Yeah. So Shaw as well was a eugenicist. So I would say with cases of both Shaw and Wells, Chesterton had almost no philosophical common ground with them. But he had some. But almost none. And yet he was able to maintain a close friendship with both of them. But they loved him. They respected him, even though they really disagreed with him on everything. They loved Chesterton. Wells would have Chesterton as a guest at his home for a whole weekend and things like that. And when Chesterton died, Wells told Chesterton’s widow, he says, if there’s any chance of me going to heaven, it’s going to be because I was a friend of G. K. Chesterton. That’s how strongly he felt about it, even though there was no sign of a spiritual transformation in his life. That friendship, that goodness that Chesterton showed him had an impact on his soul. And that’s what we have to remember.

You know, the reason we love our enemies is not to crush them, but to convert them. We want them to join our side. We want them to betray the side they’re on and come over to our side. And we can do that with, yes, arguing with them about what they believe and answering their questions and their doubts and their skeptical darts that they’re firing, but it starts with love. It starts with love. And that’s what transforms people’s lives. You know, the way the Holy Spirit works on us is with love. We have to know the right answers. Chesterton talks about Nehemiah. And when Nehemiah is rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, his men have a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other hand. And Chesterton says the sword is for defense. And he says, and that’s what reason is. The sword is the tool of reason. You have to be able to defend against the enemy when the enemy attacks. And that’s what you use your reason for. But the trowel is the creative tool, and that’s what builds. And that’s the tool of love. You can’t build anything with a sword. You can only build with the trowel. And so, yeah, you gotta be ready to defend the truth when it’s attacked. But that’s not the only work we do. We’re here to build the kingdom of God. And that’s a work of love.

Cherie Harder: Well, Dale, there’s so much more I would love to ask you, but I also see the questions from our viewers piling up. So we’re going to turn to those. And just as a quick reminder to those of you who are joining us, you can not only ask a question, but you can like a question. And that helps give us an idea of what some of the more popular questions are. So starting us off is David Donegan and David asks, “As Christmas approaches, Chesterton wrote the introduction to A Christmas Carol by Dickens in the original first published edition. Can you elaborate on how that came to be and how Chesterton felt about Dickens?”

Dale Ahlquist: Well, first of all, the writer who influenced G. K. Chesterton the most was Charles Dickens. That’s probably a surprise to a lot of people. But to go back to your questions about the imagination, what Chesterton said Dickens did was call these spirits up from the deep and create these people that are so real, even though they’re comical and bizarre and everything. They are such real figures that you can get to know them and they’re just such a— they’re a work of love, Dickens’ characters. And so he wrote an introduction to— every book that Dickens wrote, Chesterton wrote an introduction to it. And his book on Dickens created a revival of interest in Dickens in England when he was just starting to be forgotten because he loves Dickens. He’s the writer of hope. And in his introduction to the book, he says, “Abandon all hopelessness, you who enter here,” in reading Dickens.

So with Scrooge, you know, Scrooge, it’s a great story of conversion and, of course, it continues to thrill audiences today. You know, it’s a timeless tale of conversion. But also what it did, and people forget this, is it revived an interest in Christmas. Christmas itself was being neglected in England. And what Dickens did is that he revived an interest in Christmas itself. Every year, these hopes get renewed each year at Christmas, and A Christmas Carol is one of the ways that it happens.

Cherie Harder: So, Betsy Kadot asks, “How did G.K. Chesterton’s Catholic faith influence his writing? And would it have been different if he’d remained Protestant?”

Dale Ahlquist: So Chesterton became a Catholic in 1922. So he’d been writing at that point for 22 years. His writing career really begins at 1900, and he dies in 1936. So he was only a Catholic for 14 of his 36 years as a writer. So less than half. To compare his writings pre-conversion and post-conversion, you really can’t tell the difference. It’s only when he’s specifically addressing specific Catholic doctrines that that he clearly has a Catholic perspective. But interestingly enough, he’s already defending Catholic doctrines before his conversion. His most famous character, of course, is the Father Brown character, the priest who is the detective. He wrote half the Father Brown stories before his conversion. So he’s already thinking like a Catholic. And I would say that the conversion, it affected his soul and his outlook, but it didn’t affect his writing.

Cherie Harder: That’s really interesting. So a question from Richard Miles, who asks, “What are some living authors or public intellectuals today who most embody the Chesterton Option?”

Dale Ahlquist: Nope. [Laughs.] So, you know, one of the books that I just recently edited that has just come out, it’s called Localism. And there’s a lot of— several different writers have contributed to that book. I’d highly recommend getting that book so you can see people who are writing different aspects about localism or what we could certainly call the Chesterton Option. And one of those writers in there who’s just fantastic is Anthony Esolen. So I’d highly recommend him. One of the other contributors to that book is Senator Marco Rubio, who, you know, can add that to his resume, if he becomes the next secretary of state, he can add that to his resume as also being a contributor to the book that Dale Ahlquist edited on localism.

Cherie Harder: So a question from John Downing, who asks, “If you are new to Chesterton’s works, where would you start and why?”

Dale Ahlquist: Well, Chesterton is, above all things, a master essayist. He wrote for the newspapers, and he wrote all his literary essays. In your materials you said he wrote 4,000. He wrote actually twice that many. He wrote 8,000 essays. It’s absolutely astonishing how much he wrote. But he’s a master essayist. And if you want to read, if you want to start with just pure Chesterton, get a book of his essays. I edited one called In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G. K. Chesterton. And I could easily edit another one called The Other Best Essays of Chesterton. But if you want pure Chesterton, start with the essays. Other good introductory books would be the Father Brown stories or his book on Charles Dickens, which we’ve already talked about. His book on Saint Francis of Assisi is another good place to start. At some point you have to read Orthodoxy and you have to read The Everlasting Man. You have to read those two books at some point, but you don’t necessarily, or probably should not, start with those.

Cherie Harder: Kind of build up to those.

Dale Ahlquist: Yeah.

Cherie Harder: So a question from an anonymous attendee who asked this. They say, “In my limited reading of Chesterton, I’m struck by all the things you’re talking about, that is, imagination, paradox, and wonder, but even more by an insistence on benevolence and love. There are plenty of people using imagination and cleverness for bad ends. How can we as a society promote the intellect without falling into the trap of misanthropy?”

Dale Ahlquist: Yeah, that’s a very good question. It touches on what we talked about before, how Chesterton was able to get along with people with whom he really disagreed. And if there’s any temptation in today’s society, it’s to become very cynical towards people that we disagree with. We’ve watched certainly the polarization coming out of this last election, and it’s really hard to carry on conversations with people where we don’t agree on politics. People have lost friendships because of political differences. But we have to keep love out in front. And, you know, Chesterton’s way of doing it is that you have to look at everyone as if they are Christ themselves. Right? You show your generosity, your meekness, and your thankfulness in all the acts you do towards other people. Chesterton says, “Thanks is the highest form of thought.” Thanks is the highest form of thought. If we are thankful, if we realize that everything we have is a gift that we didn’t deserve, that’s what prevents us from becoming cynical, from becoming angry, from becoming impatient, from becoming in any way feeling entitled, or that we’ve been treated unjustly. Thanks is the highest form of thought. And Chesterton lived that life. That’s why he’s such a fascinating character. He lived a life full of thanks and full of wonder. And you can feel it in his writing. You hear it in the stories told about him. And that’s why he’s such an inspiration.

Cherie Harder: That’s great. So Charlie Palmgren asks, “Does Chesterton describe skills that can help people regain their imaginations?”

Dale Ahlquist: Oh, that’s a great question. Well, you know, the thing about skills is everybody can learn a skill. This goes back to what we do at Chesterton Academy. All of our students learn how to draw and paint. Everyone. Art is a required class. And music and drama are also required. And the point is, just like you require math and you can learn math by going through the exercises, well, you can also learn art by going through the exercises. So our students at Chesterton Academy by their senior year are copying oil masterpieces because they’ve had four years of studying art and learning all the techniques of painting. The kids learn how to sing and they learn how to act and put on good plays. Well, we get those ideas from G. K. Chesterton. That’s why we do this. The craftsmanship, the things that are being lost by mass production, by the dehumanization of the way we make things and the way we expect things to happen, all these things can be recovered. Chesterton always is praising the peasant life, the simple life, the hands-on life, because that allows us to be creative and also allows us to appreciate other people’s creativity.

Cherie Harder: That’s great. So a question from an anonymous attendee who asks, “The young people I work with seem to reject either/or thinking and prefer both/and. Is Chesterton, with his use of paradox, a voice for this younger generation?”

Dale Ahlquist: Oh, that’s lovely. Well, you know, in many ways, yes. The paradox does allow us to see that there’s this apparently contradictory element to truth. Now, you can’t confuse that with kind of this eastern yin-yang version [where] there’s a little bit of good in every evil, a little bit of evil in every good. That’s not how paradox works. Paradox works— that God is love, but God is also wrath. There is judgment, but there is mercy. And they are both happening at the same time. One doesn’t blend into the other. Red and white don’t become pink in Chesterton. He says the church has always had a healthy hatred of pink. He says you have to have both red and both white at the fullness of their intensity and accept both those ideas at the same time.

And I think the best way to describe it is, it comes from Orthodoxy, where he explains the paradox, he said our physical sight is stereoscopic. We see with two different eyes, and we are then literally seeing two different pictures of the world at the same time. Well, our spiritual sight has to be the same way. We have to see two different pictures at the same time, and we put them together and see better for that. And that’s why it’s possible to believe that God is all-powerful and omnipotent and all-knowing, and that we have free will. And if you don’t believe both those things, it will lead to insanity. You have to believe them both. If we don’t have any free will, then our decisions don’t matter. If God isn’t all powerful, we can’t worship him. They have to both be going at their full blast. And, of course, the great contradiction is Christ himself. Fully God, fully man.

Cherie Harder: As an aside, a few years ago we hosted Jeremy Begbie, who talked about a way of understanding the Trinity musically, in that, with a chord, there are three distinct notes, each of which fully fill a room and yet are distinct but in harmony. And that by essentially shifting from, say, a logical comparison to a musical artistic metaphor, we can better understand. So that’s really interesting. So Mark Escobar asks, “Does G. K. Chesterton particularly reflect an influence of the Gospel of John as he uses images or metaphors in his narrative, reflecting on the mystical reality of God in Christ?”

Dale Ahlquist: Does he specifically use John? Cheston pulls in— there’s elements of all the Gospels coming into his writing. I’m trying to think of any specific references to John off the top of my head. I mean, let’s see. He’s got a lot of references to the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes to the Nativity. He talks about, certainly the death and the crucifixion and the resurrection are referred to throughout his writings, but I can’t think of anything more specific to John off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s something, but I’m going to have to say doesn’t occur to me.

Cherie Harder: That’s fine. So another question comes from Joel Christie, and Joel asked, “How do you suppose Chesterton would encourage the development of intrinsic motivation for ourselves and others, in order to push against the tendency to make excuses that reflect convenience and decadence?”

Dale Ahlquist: Well, there’s no one who defends free will more than G. K. Chesterton. And the whole idea is that we are responsible for our actions. We cannot blame our actions on anything else. He says most all of modern philosophies do that. They are an attack on free will. They are doing the very thing of saying, “Well, it wasn’t my fault. This other thing is the reason why I did that.” And so they blame biology, economics, social status, psychology, sex, some other big thing is the reason for what they are and not their own responsibility. And as soon as we start thinking that way, well, then we’re helpless to make any changes in either our own lives or in society. And, you know, it’s a further sign of decadence. So, yeah, Chesterton’s always defending free will, and freedom means responsibility. That’s the whole thing. You know, we say that one of the fruits of the spirit is self-control. Self-control is what self-government is. It’s governing yourselves. That’s the basis of freedom. That’s the basis of democracy, is self-government. Controlling ourselves, but, you know, acting in such a way that we are the catalyst of what we do. Chesterton is a defender of democracy, self-control, self-government, and that’s what common sense is too, by the way.

Cherie Harder: So we have two questions—I’m actually going to combine them—kind of trying to probe a little bit further into localism and family versus the broader issues that G. K. Chesterton addressed. So Ramona Rusanac—and Ramona, apologies if I mispronounced your last name—said, “One of your statements caught my attention. Love of family can turn inward into idolatry, to my family and my family alone. There isn’t an automatic transfer of benefit to the surrounding community. What are the characteristics of a family focus that stays balanced and able to benefit the surrounding community?” And then, somewhat relatedly, Sara Hammersma asked, “I am always challenged by public figures who teach the most important stuff is small, local, and inside the family. Not wanting to judge, but to understand, was his taking of such a public role an instance of ‘do what I say, not what I do’?”

Dale Ahlquist: Okay, two good challenging questions. You know, in the case of the family, Chesterton couldn’t have children. He and his wife were childless. And so he was a great defender of the thing that he couldn’t have. But he realized how important it was. He did have the equivalent of foster children stay at his home and would host no-adults-allowed parties for children because he adored children and loved the chaos of a family around him. He worked best in a chaotic setting. So there were always children in his home, which is very interesting. And then there were neighbors that he kind of adopted, in a way. There was a fatherless family whose daughters he took intimate care of. So he did live out his ideals in that way, the best he could, not having any children of his own.

To go to that first question about the idolatry of the family. It’s not that we are inward. Don’t misunderstand what Chesterton is saying about the— family is the basis of society. It’s the basic unit of society. You have to have a strong family to have a strong society. And so a well-formed child has a loving father and a loving mother and a well-formed father and mother have a child that’s intimately connected to the home. Life is most lived in the home. That’s the point. If everything is taken out of the home, there’s really no family anymore. The family doesn’t exist if mother and father are mostly gone, if child is mostly gone. And so you lose the integrity of the family. So, it’s not idolatry or just inwardness, but it’s recognizing that everything comes from this strong family unit and then emanates from that to the rest of the world. You know, we can transform the world around us by being strong ourselves.

Cherie Harder: Yes. Well, Dale, thank you. There’s so much more I’d love to ask you. And in just a moment, I’m going to give you the last word. But before that, a few things just to share with all of you who are watching. First, immediately after we conclude, we will be sending around an online survey or feedback form. We’d love for you to fill this out. We read all of these. We do try to take your ideas into account to make this program ever more valuable to you, and as a small token of our appreciation for your doing so, we will send you a code for a free Trinity Forum Reading download of your choice. There’s actually several that we would recommend that basically pick up on the themes of our conversation today and go even deeper, including one of Chesterton’s short stories, “The Oracle of the Dog,” part of his Father Brown mystery series, also George MacDonald’s “The Golden Key.” We were talking about George MacDonald just a little bit earlier. Others that we would recommend include “Why God Became Man” by Anselm, “Spirit and Imagination” with an introduction by Malcolm Guite, Handel’s “Messiah,” and “Bright Evening Star” by Madeleine L’Engle.

In addition, tomorrow we will be sending around an email with a link to a lightly edited video of today’s Online Conversation, along with a list of additional readings and resources if you want to go more deeply into today’s topic, so be on the alert for that. And we would welcome your interest in starting a discussion group. Think about what you’ve been hearing, invite others in for a deeper and more robust discussion of some of the ideas that you’ve encountered today. We’ll also be sending around discussion questions as part of our follow-up email if you want to host such a reading and discussion group.

In addition, we would love to invite all of you who are watching today to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people interested in advancing Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought. We would love to have you as part of our community. There are, not surprisingly, many benefits to being part of the Trinity Forum Society, including a subscription to our quarterly Readings, including our upcoming Reading featuring “The Strangest Story in the World,” a subscription to our daily “What We’re Reading” list of reading recommendations, and as a special benefit and show of appreciation, we will send you not only a free copy of our Christmas Reading featuring “The Strangest Story in the World,” but also a signed copy of Dale Ahlquist’s guide to The Everlasting Man. And that’s available with your joining the Trinity Forum Society or your gift of $100 or more. So we hope that you will take advantage of that opportunity and that we’ll be able to welcome you into this community.

Also wanted to note, since this is our last Online Conversation of the year, that we will shortly be putting out a schedule of new and exciting upcoming Online Conversations. This is shaping up to be a great 2025. Already booked include Ross Douthat on his new book, Tom Holland from The Rest is History, Curt Thompson, and many others. So be on the lookout for that list of new Online Conversations. Also, especially as we wrap out the year, I really want to thank my colleagues at the Trinity Forum, the team behind the Online Conversation, who make this and our other programs possible. So many thanks to Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Brian Dascomb, Marie-Anne Morris, and Macrae Henke, as well as our excellent interns. Obviously could not do it without any of you.

Finally, Dale, as we close out our time together, I wanted to give you the last word.

Dale Ahlquist: Well, Cherie, thank you for hosting me. And thank you for your fine questions today. It was really a pleasure to be with you. And thank you everyone for watching. And thanks for the great questions that were asked. I hope I did Chesterton some justice in presenting him. He’s a life-changing writer. He changed my life. And I can only encourage others to read him and delight in him. He’s such a source of joy. But that flash of wisdom, the lights that come on when you’re when you’re reading him. And this book, The Everlasting Man, does have one of my favorite lines from Chesterton in it. It’s a line that a lot of people do quote. It was in the material that was handed out. But I remember the first time I read it, it put the shivers down my spine because it sums up everything that we have to be. And that is: “The dead thing goes with the stream. Only the living thing can go against it.” The whole world is going one direction right now, and it’s not towards God. We have to be the living thing going against the stream. And that’s our challenge. And that’s how we obey the great commandments. To love people is to go against the stream. To help people is to go against the stream. And to be like Christ is to go against the stream. “The dead thing goes with the stream. Only the living thing can go against it.” God bless and Merry Christmas.

Cherie Harder: Dale, thank you so much. It’s been a joy.

Dale Ahlquist: Thank you.

Cherie Harder: Thank you to all of you for joining us. And from all of us at the Trinity Forum, have a very Merry Christmas.