A Chesterton anthology.

A Chesterton Anthology

ONE OF Chesterton's many admirers is Jorge Luis Borges, who thinks him a prophet and has written: "Beneath his jokes was a profound erudition." The great French philosopher Etienne Gilson called GKC "one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed" and read his little book on St. Thomas "with despair" that this "amateur" had captured so much more of the saint than the professional scholars had. And in one of the wisest and most esteemed books of modern psychology, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker presents Chesterton as a monumental hero of sanity in an anxious and often openly psychotic age. It is precisely this sanity, joined to an unwearying wit and inimitable aphoristic eloquence, that commends Chesterton most in this age of specialist nonsense, ideology, jargon, faddish fecklessness, and aesthetic nihilism. In "Obstinate Orthodoxy," Chesterton wrote that "the truth is that the modern world has had a mental breakdown," much more, even, "than a moral breakdown." No one has ever, in a few simple words, described the genealogy of our modern subjectivism and relativism, their roots in "ontological insecurity" and the attenuation of sane tradition, better than Chesterton: "No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be molded to suit it, all standards may be molded to suit the self." Thus, fifty years after his death, yet another Chesterton anthology, following closely on the heels of Robert Knille's fine Chesterton Reader (reviewed in NR, September 6, 1985), is both welcome and encouraging, especially as it is even better tkan Knille's--better because longer (515 pages to 314 pages) and because it therefore contains longer and more complete (and often different) selections, as well as a finely appreciative introduction by the English novelist and poet P. J. Kavanagh. "It is surprising," Malcolm Muggeridge has written, that even though Chesterton has been so often "proved right in his judgments, he should still be less seriously regarded than contemporaries like Wells and the Webbs, who were almost invariably wrong." Although experience does often seem to "beat in vain on the breast of the congenital progressive," and modern culture continues to distract us from distraction by distraction, if there is any antidote it can be found in this fine anthology, brim-full of Chesterton's mighty wit and sparkling with his piety, sanity, and "grave levity."