Orthodoxy

One of the most famous authors of the 20th century, Gilbert Keith Chesterton—colloquially known as G. K. Chesterton—was born in Kensington, England, in 1874. Baptized into the Anglican Church as an infant, his family were rather nominal Christian observers. In his youth, Chesterton dabbled in the occult and considered himself to be an agnostic. Chesterton married Frances Blogg in 1901, but the couple were never able to have children. His wife would later push him back toward regular Christian observance, and in 1922 (at the age of 48), he would enter the Roman Catholic Church as a devout believer.

Out of university, Chesterton began work at a publishing house, and several years later, he became a full-time journalist as an essayist and critic of the arts. Though he would be employed as a journalist for the rest of his life, he is most well-known for his prolific work as a writer of novels and essays. Authoring scores of books, his most famous works include Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Man Who Was Thursday, and The Everlasting Man. Additionally, his series of short stories centering around the character of Father Brown—a Catholic priest who solves mysteries—is one of the more popular mystery series of the 20th century.

The work of Orthodoxy is a follow-up to his well-received work Heretics, in which he lays out the philosophical view that led him to embrace the claims of the Catholic Church as those that best explain the whole of reality. Writing in a loquacious yet down-to-earth style, Chesterton is known for his employment of paradox, as well as his use of images, metaphors, sharp turns of phrase, and witty criticisms.

Even while alive, Chesterton was a man that divided opinion. Many people appreciated his particular style of writing in addition to the uplifting and intellectually stimulating content of his work. Though he died before the major onslaught of World War II, Chesterton was a vocal critic of war, violence, antisemitism, and the eugenics movement. As for his political views, Chesterton was one among a vocal minority who advocated for a social-political structure dubbed distributism, in which private property and the free market would be retained and respected but the vast majority of physical goods and property would be as widely distributed as possible. For a good number of early-20th-century Catholic thinkers—Chesterton, Belloc, and Vincent McNabb, for instance—this was a desirable middle ground between unfettered capitalism and the socialist and communist regimes that they feared would destroy Europe.

A physically imposing man, Chesterton was very tall but struggled with health complications associated with his weight. This would eventually lead to his succumbing to congestive heart failure in his sixties. He died, being survived by his wife, in 1936 at his home in Buckinghamshire. The funeral Mass was celebrated by the famous Ronald Knox, a renowned fellow English convert to Catholicism.