Christian History Magazine Collection

Chesterton’s spiritual journey.

by Adam Schwartz from Christian History magazine no. 75

At the place where the roads meet there is no doubt of the convergence. A man may think all sorts of things, most of them honest and many of them true, about the right way to turn in the maze at Hampton Court. But he does not think he is in the center; he knows.”

So wrote media star, mystery writer, and amateur theologian G.K. Chesterton in The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic. In the years leading up to this statement, though, he doubted whether roads met or even existed, and he was not at all sure what lay at the center of his life’s maze. The story of his twisting, halting search for that place where truth makes sense is in many ways the story of his life.

Descent into madness

Chesterton’s spiritual search began with his family’s Liberalism. His parents were religious enough to have him baptized by the Church of England in 1874, but they otherwise had little use for traditional Christianity. If anything, they leaned toward Unitarianism.

“My own father and uncles,” Chesterton wrote in his Autobiography, “were entirely of the period that believed in progress, and generally in new things, all the more because they were finding it increasingly difficult to believe in old things; and in some cases in anything at all.”

Chesterton described the cultural atmosphere of his youth as distinctly post-Christian. There was “nothing new or odd about not having a religion. … We might almost say that agnosticism was an established church.”

In his youth, Chesterton expressed some curiosity about orthodox Christianity (though he disliked Roman Catholicism) and twinges of anxiety about Liberalism. These explorations soon stalled. His earliest writings extolled the French Revolution, condemned dogma, and preached the exaltation of humanity.

All of this changed, however, at the Slade School of Art.

Chesterton enrolled at the Slade School in late 1892, and over the next year he went through a nihilistic phase. He called this episode “my period of madness.” Friends also feared for his sanity.

The fashion of the day was Impressionism, which celebrated the artist’s perspective while downplaying physical reality. “Its principal,” Chesterton wrote, “was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow.”

Seized by this mentality, he began to doubt the world around him. “It was as if I had myself projected the universe from within, with its trees and stars; and that is so near to the notion of being God that it is manifestly even nearer to going mad. Yet I was not mad, in any medical or physical sense; I was simply carrying the scepticism of my time as far as it would go.”

Radical realism

Chiefly by reading authors who affirmed existence and its basic goodness (particularly Robert Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Walt Whitman), Chesterton emerged from the depths of depression by late 1893 or early 1894. He began to cultivate gratitude for life and wide-eyed wonder at the world—ideas so counter-cultural at the time, they seemed almost radical.

He took these insights with him as he left the Slade School in 1895 and began a career in publishing. He headed to London’s journalistic hub, Fleet Street, and spent the next several years honing his ideas before a large and varied readership.

Much of Chesterton’s intellectual development can be traced in his weekly columns for the mass-market Daily News between 1901 and 1913. To grab readers in a highly competitive market, the traditionally Nonconformist (low-church Protestant) paper assembled several strong writers and gave them broad leeway to comment on society, ideas, and world events. Chesterton became one of the publication’s stars, aiding a rise in circulation from 56,000 in 1900 to 400,000 in 1909.

As Chesterton developed his personal philosophy, he faced the professional challenge of stimulating and provoking his readers without alienating either them or his long-suffering editor, A.G. Gardiner. The balance grew more precarious as he gravitated further from the Liberalism most of his readers embraced and closer to earthy traditions they deemed retrograde.

Chesterton’s brother, Cecil, described the situation this way in 1908: “Thousands of peaceful semi-Tolstoian Nonconformists have for six years, been compelled to listen every Saturday morning to a fiery apostle preaching … War, Drink and Catholicism.”

In fact, Chesterton did not preach Catholicism, or any coherent system, in his early career. He was still working out the details of faith and philosophy, wondering where his fundamental commitments to gratitude and against modern skepticism would lead. He and his readers would soon find out.

Steps toward faith

Behind the scenes of his professional success, a number of personal factors pulled Chesterton toward orthodox Christianity and, eventually, Roman Catholicism.

Taking a first step in the direction of faith, Chesterton realized that the gift of life, for which he had grown so grateful, must have been given by someone. “The truth presented itself to me, rather, in the form that where there is anything there is God,” he wrote.

Chesterton had help in taking the second step toward faith.

In 1896, he met and became enamored with Frances Blogg, an officer of a London debating salon. Chesterton admired her confidence and discovered that it was rooted in her devout High Anglican faith. Her religion was “the unique quality that cut her off from the current culture and saved her from it.”

Chesterton credited Frances with leading him from his vestigial Unitarianism to Anglicanism. But even though he was moving toward High Anglicanism at the time of their 1901 marriage, he still had a clearer sense of what he rejected than of what he believed. His criticism of modern theology and philosophy, laid out in Heretics (1905), left his affirmation of orthodox Christianity largely implied.

Chesterton finally asserted his faith in 1908 with Orthodoxy. In this book, he defines orthodox Christianity as the “philosophy of sanity” and shows how Christian beliefs answer deep modern problems.

For example, because Christians believe in an Incarnation, they believe in matter, spirit, and interaction between the two. This gives Christians respect for both the rational and mystical aspects of life. It also saves them from the radical doubts that nearly drove Chesterton mad in art school.

Furthermore, the historical doctrines of Christianity, so often blamed for blinding people from reality, actually reveal reality by keeping believers from blinding themselves with personal heresies. Fancy new schemes for understanding the world simply cannot compete with orthodoxy’s tradition of defining dogmas. That tradition, he wrote, has not “told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.”

Truth is not the only thing Christian orthodoxy lavishes on its followers. In the “old theology [rather] than the new,” Chesterton wrote, “we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation-Christendom.” And, of utmost importance to Chesterton, Christians also get a Creator to whom they can express their gratitude