The Everlasting Man - GK Chesterton
When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. — GK Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
The Chestertonian style of writing is difficult initially to get accustomed to as a reader and many times I had to return to various sections to understand what Chesterton was saying. Nonetheless, it makes for a fascinating read and is one of Chesterton’s major apologetic works.
What I remember the most is his discussion of the Punic wars, something new to me, and Chesterton marks it as an important moment in the history of Europe. The war was fought between Rome and Carthage. Chesterton equates Carthage with a demonic, inhuman, materialist and commercial spirit and Rome, although pagan too, as the sane mythologists. I also discovered that the name Hannibal, who was a Carthaginian general and statesman, when translated into the native tongue of Carthage at the time means Grace of Baal. I came across Baal before and knew he was, and is, a demonic god, an idol, who demands child sacrifice. This indeed took place in Carthage. There are similarities today in the West with our current culture of death via on demand abortion and low birth rates.
Apart from this, I also recollect quite vividly Chesterton’s analysis and description of the Asian mind. He claims that it can be represented by a round 0 or a circle. This symbol reflects the idea of unity and recurrence that in one sense includes everything but then comes to nothing. There is no breakout from the circle. For Chesterton, the cross, “in fact as well as figure”, does stand for the idea of breaking out of this circle that is both everything and nothing.
The first chapter concerns prehistoric man, his pictures in the cave and the interpretation of this period of history, with a focused criticism of H.G Wells’ evolutionary materialist worldview. I particularly loved the thought that Chesterton gave concerning the very word evolution; the word suggests the notion of something smooth and slow, a long process, which is then used to help finally explain the origins of the world without the aid of a creator. It allows us to oppose the idea of a swift and sudden action by God when he created the world from nothing. For Chesterton this is a “illogicality and illusion” because…
An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one.
Now concerning prehistoric man, the fact that he could draw pictures on his walls, in the caves, of animals shows that he has a higher faculty and was not merely a brute or an animal back then, for animals cannot draw or paint. There wasn’t a monkey who started drawing a picture that was then completed by a man and “pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and homo sapiens draw it well”, as the evolutionists would have to suppose. Only in man do we see this creative impulse. The book ends with a description of how Christianity has risen and fallen with the passage of time and so I shall also end my review here with a typical Chestertonian riposte.
“Christianity has died many times and has risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” — GK Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
