"The sword glitters"

I only possess a few of Chesterton's thirty-some books: Heretics and Orthodoxy, of course, his Autobiography, and The Man Who was Thursday. I also have a couple of collections of quotations. He was eminently quotable. He was admired by C.S. Lewis, and that was what first brought me to him. In a very good essay, "Chesterton's Radical Sanity," Rachel Lu on his great strength and some of his weaknesses:

The only possible excuse for this book,” wrote G.K. Chesterton at the outset of his 1908 book Orthodoxy, “is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.”

This is vintage Chesterton: witty, memorable, charmingly self-deprecating. Just two lines into the book, he already has readers fully engaged, hungry for further explanation. It’s a great lead-in to Orthodoxy, but also to Chesterton’s work more broadly.

Building on his intriguing start, Chesterton relates how the reviewers of his previous 1905 work, Heretics, had complained that it was unreasonable for him to engage in armchair criticism of their philosophies when he had yet to explain his own. “It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make,” he notes, “to a person only too ready to write books on the feeblest provocation.” But though Orthodoxy is pitched as an answer to this challenge, Chesterton offers an important qualification. “I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it,” he explains. “God and humanity made it; and it made me.”

With a vast corpus and a wide range of interlocutors, Chesterton did a lot of shooting in his lifetime, hitting some targets and missing others by wide margins. He was winsome, whimsical, profound but also preposterous, maddeningly unsystematic, and often in error. Somehow even his bad shots feel dignified. And he himself reveals the reason here in the first lines of Orthodoxy. Chesterton understood his entire public career as a kind of answer to a challenge: the challenge of reductive, rationalist, soul-destroying pathologies of modernity. ....

...[H]e provides a wonderful conceptual framework to explain how tradition can help us cope with reality’s paralyzing complexity. If the world is large and chaotic, what is needed is an anchor, or perhaps a root, to attach human society to something firmer and more permanent than the whims and fantasies of a given moment. Tradition can be that root. A firm grounding in the wisdom of the past can enable the living to hold seemingly-conflicting truths in a dynamic tension, drawing stability and nourishment from the root in order to engage the world with confidence. More than just explaining this theory, Chesterton lived it, delineating a space much like what the humanist Lee Oser calls “the radical middle,” in which the strong root of Christian tradition and orthodoxy enables believers to hold a “center of sanity” that looks radical to observers from many different angles mainly because it reveals a reality that is in fact wonderfully strange. .... (more)

Rachel Lu, "Chesterton's Radical Sanity," Law & Liberty, April 1, 2026.