On (G.K.) Chesterton, (Thomas) Aquinas and China.

Providence was with me this summer when I went to hear a man talk about modern China--and ended up talking to a different man about G. K. Chesterton. I have always felt ambiguous about the Chinese enigma. I have never felt anything but unequivocal love for Chesterton since reading the Father Brown stories as a boy.

So although the lecture on China was packed with revelations about that country's horrific one-child policy, I was far happier after the discussion about Chesterton despite gleaning only two new bits of Chestertrivia. Oh, and a small literary bonus.

Of course, the trivia bits were exquisite. The first was that the late father of my interlocutor was the altar boy at the Mass when Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church.

As a Chestertonian and a Catholic convert, my hearing this was equivalent to what a Marxist tailor might feel meeting a relative of whoever designed Mao Tse Tung's wardrobe.

The second bit was directly related. The father in question had been a life-long devotee of Chesterton, and had left his son boxes of G.K.'s books along with an apparently complete set of the brilliant Chesterton Review, published by Fr. Ian Boyd in Saskatoon.

"I understand you're a Chesterton freak," he said. "Could you recommend one of his books a beginner could understand?"

"Try Orthodoxy," I said. "It's best for beginning."

His face defined the wonderful English word "crestfallen."

"I have. I can't get past the first chapter. I've tried Chapter Two three times. I don't have a clue what he's talking about."

I offered sympathetic murmurs about how unfortunate it would be for such wonderful books to go to waste.

Does anyone use the word "ruminate" any more? That's what he did. Then after a pause of Ming Dynasty length, he popped the question.

"Is there a particular Chesterton book you'd like to have?"

"Well," I said inscrutably, "I never have been able to get his life of St. Thomas Aquinas. I don't suppose there's any chance your dad. . . ."

His answer was lost in the beginning of the other man's lecture on the Middle Kingdom. But then, a few weeks later, the package arrived in the mail. Did I call it a small literary bonus?

Well, small is accurate. It is only 158 pages long. But "bonus" hardly does justice. Imagine being surprised with the gift of a book by your favourite author on your favorite topic. That, for me, is Chesterton on Aquinas.

It is a book the great Thomistic scholar and writer Etienne Gilson said he wished he'd written. It is a book every Catholic really should re-read. For in his wonderfully engaging telling of the tale of St. Thomas, Chesterton refreshes and renews us in the story of the life of Holy Mother Church. It is almost impossible here to summarize what is packed into those mere 158 pages.

One aspect of Chesterton's book that must be emphasized, however, is his emphasis on St. Thomas as the model of the placid and implacable warrior in the ceaseless struggle to preserve the Church.

Such preservation, he reminds us, is not only required from the assaults of our enemies, but from those within the Church who distort her Truth to recreate her in their own image. "It is (a) fact that falsehood is never so false as when it is nearly true. It is when the stab comes near the nerve of truth that the Christian conscience cries out in pain," Chesterton wrote.

The thought is critically important in reminding us that the battles we wage on that front today are but different aspects of the same internal and external fights the Angelic Doctor fought more than 800 years ago. The names and faces of the assailants have changed. It is still Christian innocence that must be protected.

The great political philosopher Eric Voegelin once said that what the Church needs now is not neo-Thomists, but a new Thomas. Chesterton's little book makes clear that every time we renew his struggle, we renew St. Thomas.

None of us can ever hope to have his extraordinary mind. But all of us can pray for his ox-like stubbornness and patience against those who would make the eternal Church indistinguishable from modern China.

Peter Stockland writes for the Calgary Herald. His column appears every other issue.