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G.K. Chesterton - The Everlasting Man with Timothy Larsen · Christians Reading Classics

0:10
SPEAKER_01: In 1925, Gilbert Keith Chesterton published The Everlasting Man.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: In his introduction to the book, he mused, There are two ways of getting home, and one of them is to stay there.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: The other is to walk around the whole world till we come back to the same place.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: And I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: It is only too probable that I shall never write it.
0:45
SPEAKER_01: So I will use it symbolically here, for it was a symbol of the same truth.
0:49
SPEAKER_01: I conceived it as a romance, of those vast valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient white horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills.
1:00
SPEAKER_01: It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant.
1:10
SPEAKER_01: And when he was far enough from home, he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen garden, shining flat on the hillside, like the colors and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure on which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: And that is the point of this book.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a new podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: I am Nadia Williams, and today I am talking with Dr.
1:47
SPEAKER_01: Timothy Larson, the McManus Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: He is also president of the American Society of Church History for this year, 2025.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: He is the author or editor of, I think, 20 books now, including the Oxford Handbook of Christmas.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: But book 21, if I've counted correctly, is coming this December, and we'll talk about it later in this conversation.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: But our main concern here is Chesterton and the Everlasting Man.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: So this season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary this year.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: But I want to open with a more um abstract question before we get to the everlasting man in particular.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: What is a classic?
2:30
SPEAKER_01: Is it enough that we're still reading Chesterton in this particular book a hundred years after publication?
2:35
SPEAKER_01: Or are there other criteria you would add?
2:38
SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is so much fun to get into.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh I do feel a little thrown off by your introduction with that amazing quotation, which so I have ringing in my head, which I will just get out.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh T.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: S.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: Elliot, we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive back where we started and know the place for the first time.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think Elliot also wrote uh classic poems.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he's one of my favorite poets.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I will segue to your actual question, uh, but we'll get more into that generation, which is Chesterton and Elliot, finding the home of the Christian faith again after wandering all around the world beforehand.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: So I think there are a couple layers to what makes a classic.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the first one is its impact on you personally as a reader.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: You find yourself haunted by it, it becomes a reference point in your thinking.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: You find yourself uh wanting to revisit it.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: It's a book that you're more inclined to reread, even if you're not a big rereader.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: If you were going to reread, you would reread this one more than some others.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: But then the next layer is that that's true of many people.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: So you could that could be that could that could be true for you for very personal reasons.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: This book just spoke exactly to a problem that's going on in my life or an experience that I've had.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but you find a generation has many people in it who have had that same experience.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: This book has this impact on me, it haunts me, I I want to return to it.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then that endures over multiple generations, is the third layer for sure.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: So a book could just like just nail so perfectly what's going on at a particular moment in the zeitgeist that everybody's talking about it for one generation.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Like it just kind of feels like it just kind of named what we're going through.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: But if it goes multiple generations, then it's saying something enduring about the human condition, which I think is really part of what makes a classic a classic.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: Is this something that is about our lives existentially in an ongoing way, not just a cultural kind of bubble moment.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: And so we want to revisit it.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: And then it's a beautiful thing because it becomes um this aha moment with other people.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you referenced that thing that means so much to me, and you know it too.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I really love that about a classic.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: I think a certain kind of mind uh worries too much, like, well, this is kind of arbitrary.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh, lots of other equally good things are not well known.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: And that's true, but that's because we're finite human beings.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: We can only know so much literature and read so much literature.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: And so it's a precious gift that we have these ones that we both know and both value, and we can make a reference point in our thinking, in our speaking, in our writing.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: And I find that a great gift.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: That's wonderful.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: And I always feel that connection if you meet someone and you're talking and something like it comes up that you both appreciate a particular book, and suddenly it's like, oh, okay, this is a real friend.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: So let's talk a little bit more about Chesterton himself.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: So let's say someone has heard of him, but um, and they'll never admit this in polite public, but you know, maybe they just don't know much about him.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: So what do they absolutely need to know?
5:39
SPEAKER_01: Like brief introduction to the man and his time.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: Who was he?
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is a harder one to answer for Chesterton than most people, because he was so exuberant.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: He was this kind of volcano of productivity and energy and um ideas um and playfulness.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: So, like the way to illustrate this, his degree was actually in visual art.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: He was quite a good uh drawer.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he drew his whole life.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: But you don't think about Chesterton with drawing, but it's there as a real thing.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he was one of the greatest debaters of his generation.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Most people I don't think of him, think of him as a debater.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: He would often answer the question himself by saying he was a journalist, but few people would answer that question today and say he was a journalist.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he certainly was a Christian apologist.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think, you know, the kind of the most common answer is that he was a writer, but then you'd kind of fall into this huge uh um chasm as well with that because he wrote everything.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: He wrote um novels, he wrote short stories, famously the Father Brown stories are one of the most kind of celebrated short story collections around these days.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh he wrote hymns, he wrote poetry.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: His first book was a book of poetry.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh he wrote essays, he wrote literary criticism, you know, entire books about Dickens, about, you know, Thomas Aquinas.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh he wrote, you know, um kind of Christian thought.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh so yeah, I I I think um one of the things that's delightful about Chetherton is this sense of kind of plenitude in every way.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: I remember as a kid reading the Father Brown stories because uh those were like a kid can pick those up and read those.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: Of course, as an adult, you get something very different from them.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, so now let's turn to the everlasting man specifically.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: So, why did he write this book and why in 1925?
7:30
SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking in particular of the shadow of World War I still hanging over everyone.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the most specific prompt is H.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: G.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Wells's The Outline of History, which came out in 1920, I believe.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: And um um Chaserton was annoyed by the book.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: He like he he he he liked the book, he could tell it was great in its own way.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh he has this delicious, very Chestonian kind of put down, which is it's a splendid book.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: The one thing I think he gets wrong is the outline.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: And what he means by that is you don't understand uh the human story, what what it is that is exciting about the human story, which is the story you're trying to tell.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: So you've you've uh majored on things that are not very important, you've missed things that are really important.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: So he wants to kind of uh re narrate to people what it means to be human.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: That's part of what's going on.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: Um, so the background, the whole late 19th century, early 20th century generation of intellectuals, uh it was very fashionable to be materialistic, to see to kind of um dismiss the spiritual realm as something that's not real, that we now in our kind of science, progress, modernism know doesn't exist.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: Um and uh you had you know a whole generation that was doing that.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh well certainly reflects that generation.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: And you're right, uh World War I is partly how that uh spell gets broken because it it seems to be uh the materialism writ large.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: This is if all you believe in is machines and matter, this is what you get.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: You get a world war, and it seems to um dispel the kind of false faith of a secular belief in progress.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you kind of just complacently have thought that humanity is just getting better because that's the law of the universe.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: No, humanity is still filled with sin and foolishness and evil and futility.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: So both of those things mean that there is a return to Christian faith among some intellectuals after World War I.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: And Chesterton is an early adopter of that.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: He himself um is kind of gradually being more out about his Christian faith, being more confident about it, being more willing to defend it.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: And so this would be kind of the culmination of that.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what if I could just rethink what it means to be human and explain it to people in a way that uh believes the gospel is true.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really beautiful.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, let's dive into the book pro proper.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, can you walk us through Chesterton's argument here?
10:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the book has got two parts.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: Part one is I'm the creature called Man, and part two is I'm the man called Christ.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: So part one is this re-narration of the human story.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: And he has great fun with uh the so-called caveman, uh, which is very fashionable at this time, and people think they know things about the caveman.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: And the one thing that everybody knows is that the men drag the women around by their hair.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: Justerton, of course, points out this is a complete fantasy.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: You do not know that at all.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: You have zero evidence that any caveman ever dragged any cave woman around by her hair.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: You just have made this up.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: What is the actual evidence?
11:00
SPEAKER_00: Which again is fun to kind of like, which is often what materialistic scientific people are saying at this time, you know, just stick to the evidence and don't be using your imagination.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, What is the evidence?
11:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, the evidence we have left is that they were artists and that they valued art.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: What we still have are the paintings in the caves, which people can go and look at uh to this day.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: And what does it mean to say the caveman had um, at least amongst them, artists, and that they were a community that valued art?
11:28
SPEAKER_00: It means that they're not at all in that respect like any of the lower animals.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: There are no monkey artists.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh there is no art that we value, that monkeys value, and pick any other species that you want.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, what Wells is doing and his generation of agnostic and atheist thinkers is pushing hard that human beings are very similar to the lower animals, stressing the commonalities.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: And uh Chesserton is saying you're missing the pig story, which is what makes human beings different from the lower animals.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: Of course, there are commonalities.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: Chesterton has a wonderful line in the book along the lines of, you know, yes, we are like the lower animals, but what makes us different is we're the only animal that notices that.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: A fish never thinks to itself, wow, you know, my skeletal structure is kind of like a bird's.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: We can see it, which proves the fact that we're not at all like them in some very important respects.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: So he wants to kind of redignify humanity as different and startling.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: Again, it's that finding your way back home again.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: He wants us to see ourselves as a species and be startled by ourselves.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: And then you get the second part of the book.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you want me to go into that now, or you want to kind of jump in yourself.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: All right, so the man Christ.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: So, in a wonderful kind of visual poetry, he takes up the early church report that the stable where Jesus was born was actually a cave.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: And so you have the caveman making his art, and then you have God becoming incarnate in a cave.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: So he kind of takes these two caves as the book ends of the human story, and then he wants you to be startled by the gospel story.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: You've heard it so many times you're not hearing it.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: And for God to become an infant, for him to be swaddled so he can't even move his little arms and legs, it's an extraordinary thing.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: It is not at all what you would expect.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: People who say, Oh, yeah, this is just kind of the story that everybody kind of has in their head when they're primitive.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: No, it's an amazing story, it's a remarkable story.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, and you need to grapple with it and all of its distinctiveness and think about the claim that's being made and why it matters.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: It's really striking.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, so a theme that keeps coming up in your um reflections so far is the tricks that Chesterton plays on his reader.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: It's just, he tries to really startle the reader.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: And his writing is just so beautiful.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, but also just um you uh you've noted before in an essay you wrote for Current on The Everlasting Man, you noted that um his writing smirks with paradoxical inversions.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it's very much like that's Chesterton.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: You read Father Brown Mysteries, for instance, and like, yes, there are a lot of these like puns and inversions, just really startling the reader, is very much his MO.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: So, can you talk a little bit about these paradoxical inversions?
14:39
SPEAKER_01: Why does he do this?
14:41
SPEAKER_01: Why does it work?
14:42
SPEAKER_01: Because I think it works.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's such a beautiful question.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: So if I kind of just pull out one um kind of uh larger frame first, there's something about a witty, joking, uh cheerful Christian apologist that really uh throws people off balance and confuses them.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: They expect Christians to be super earnest, you know, and to be kind of sweating because they have to defend something that's so difficult to defend.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, and Chester 10 really captured the imagination, even of the atheists and agnostic leaders in his generation, and has continued to capture people's imagination ever since because of this quality.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: He actually was kind of like an endearing beloved figure, even by H.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: G.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Wells and Bernard Shaw and all the kind of like professional atheists of that time.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: They love to read him, they love to even be criticized by him because he would do it with such wit, and they love to debate him and to hear him in debate.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: So I think there's something, there's a charism about Chesterton, which is about, you know, Christians know that the gospel is a comedy and not a tragedy.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: We have joy in our hearts.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: We are what it means to have faith is to believe that God wins.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, if you're coming across so nervous and so kind of anxious, as if whether or not God wins depends on how you answer the next question in this debate, you're not doing it right, you know.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: And Chesterton brought this kind of joy.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: But the specific inversions, uh, he's you know, roughly from the same generation as Oscar Wilde.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: And I think of him as the Oscar Wilde of Christianity.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: Oscar Wilde figured this out uh that um you could do these kind of inversion, playful kind of uh aphorisms.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, uh Oscar Wilde said, you know, I can resist anything except for temptation.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, those kind of things are fun.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, in um, you know, in in his plays, Oscar Wilde has some great lines along those lines, etc.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: And so Cheserton kind of saw that and saw that it could be used for kind of deeper purposes to get people really thinking.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: And what it does is it starts with what you think you know, and then it says the opposite, and then it forces you to think about what you really know, what is really true, what you've just accepted as kind of a truism that actually doesn't bear the weight of truth.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: Uh, so in The Everlasting Man, he says something like, Um, you know, um, most of the modern ideas are as old as Asia.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like, and this idea, oh, you know, what's supposed to be modern, which means new, and nobody's thought of it before, if you look at it, it actually is a form of thought, you know, that you could find a Greek philosopher who thought this way, you can find, you know, um all kinds of people in the ancient East who thought this way, and you're just reviving something that has been around for a long, long time.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: And I love the idea of a cheerful apologist.
17:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, I think um that is indeed an unusual.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: I was thinking, like, I was trying to think of somebody today who does apologetics who's really just joyful about it.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: And I think they're that's pretty rare.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's important.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: And it is part of it is, like I said, not thinking that it's all up to you, that somehow truth is actually going to crumble if you don't answer this question right or don't explain this thing right.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: It is you're modeling faith by by knowing that you you're not the one who makes the truth true, that makes God exist.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then you you that lightens your load.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: His yoke is easy and his burden is light.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because too often we just feel that burden that's it.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: We should be trying to save the lost, but also, yes.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, so on a related note, in your conclusion to the essay you wrote for Current, you also said Chesterton was an earthy man because he was right with God and man.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: He believed in and proclaimed a gospel in which the eternal one decided to take on flesh, to become truly human, to become earthy, to dwell in a body formed from the dust of the ground.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain a little bit more about this idea?
18:55
SPEAKER_01: Uh, why is this so significant to recognize Chesterton as an earthy man?
19:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm I'm I'm having a bit of fun.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to kind of let the spirit of Chesterton come upon me and go for a little bit of a playful paradox myself.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: So, what I'm having fun with is the best way to be spiritual is to be earthy.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like the kind of paradox that I'm trying to m have people grapple with.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: That these are things are not opposites, uh, but actually what the gospel is is about recognizing earthiness.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: So we were just talking about how, you know, the modern ideas are actually old ideas.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: And arguably the first Christological heresy is the idea that Jesus is not truly human, that he would be too spiritual to be fully human.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: That's called docetism, that he only seemed to be human, but because he was God, he couldn't actually have our body and our body fluids and all of our kind of messiness and you know hair falling out, and you know, the kind of contingency of human life that couldn't be called what God would have.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: So he must have just seemed like he had a body so we could recognize him, but he was really spiritual and not earthy.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: And you know, that's all the way back into the New Testament.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, anybody who denies that Jesus came in the flesh is antichrist.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: In other words, that's the the the heresy that has to be first refuted.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: He really was earthy, he really was made of the dust of the earth, just like we are.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: And so Cheserton is emphasizing that.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: And uh, Cheserton lived that.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: He he uh understood that our embodiedness was good and holy.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: Uh he wrote a hymn once where he refers to God as the god of earth and altar.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: It's a very haunting phrase.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: It sticks in your mind, and part of it I think is because it surprises us because we think, oh, if we're gonna try to write something spiritual, if AI would write it, it would be the God of the heavens, you know, you know, look at which is not wrong, but he's also the god of heaven and earth.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: And can we see the distinctiveness of the incarnation that he chose to take on a real human body and life that the God of heavens of the universe actually did thirst and hunger and get tired and live out the the all of the realities of our bodily life?
21:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, another classic Shakespeare, you know, he has Shylock say, you know, if you prick me, do I not bleed?
21:24
SPEAKER_00: And God became a human being that if you pricked him, he bled.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: It's a powerful, powerful thought.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: And and Chesterton wants you to be startled by it.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: So what were the reactions?
21:34
SPEAKER_01: Like, so 1925, he drops this, like, it's almost like a bomb, sort of kind of a book.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, so how did people react at the time?
21:45
SPEAKER_01: Like H.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: D.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: Wells, uh you mentioned like people HD Wells was reading Chesterton.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: So how did he react and how did others around react?
21:55
SPEAKER_00: Again, again, you had to love him.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: You had to you had to like if if you If you were just gonna be like Poe faced, Chesterton's all wrong, you kind of were not in on the joke.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, you were kind of like somebody who would like that was exposing something about you.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: And I think people saw that.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: That the right way uh to respond, if you were at all human and and alive and interesting, was to see that he was a great thinker, that he was a great writer, that he had wonderful wit and dazzling ideas.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, they say of Tertullian uh that you know pagans would read him just because the prose was so interesting, you know, and and you feel like Chizerton is like bringing us back into that kind of new world.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: Here's a modern world of secular thinkers where here is a new apologist who the prose is so interesting, the pagans are interested.
22:45
SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, the book um was well received, it's continued to be well received.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, and there was a kind of, you know, let's give due respect to the fact that here is somebody who is a worthy champion of the Christian faith.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: Not, you know, I think part of what people were used to were a kind of um weary, tired Christian champion who was like deciding how much they would kind of give away.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay, maybe miracles aren't true, but you know, still there is something inevitable that we miss to all cling to, you know, something like that.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: You know, they all just looked like they were kind of half defeated before they'd even started fighting, you know?
23:25
SPEAKER_00: And Chesterton comes in just so full of life and energy, not at all impressed with your argument, willing to defend the whole Christian faith.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: And um people were people were were excited about it.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: I do think he is an early voice that rallied a generation.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: So we talked about um T.S.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Elliott, uh W.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: H.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: Auden.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: Auden is extraordinary.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: He was the voice of modern poetry, and he comes to the Christian faith.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, later on, C.S.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Lewis uh will be an atheist who comes to the Christian faith, very influenced by Chesterton.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: So I think for a certain group of very influential, very brilliant people, Chesterton was kind of the John the Baptist, the herald of a new confidence in Christian faith, once again in the intellectual world.
24:13
SPEAKER_01: That's striking to think about that legacy, and also just how many uh famous Christian thinkers from uh that generation, right after, were converts.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: And and if they weren't converts, they had kind of not taken their faith very seriously and found a new kind of rallying of its importance.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but many of them are literal converts, some of them from atheism.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, this is a little random, but but, you know, H.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: G.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Wells, strangely during World War I, has this kind of convert moment where he thinks that only God could be the answer to the war.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: And he's embarrassed by it after the war, but it shows you how bankrupt he felt his atheism was that when he was up against something as big as the war, he knew it didn't have an answer, and he thought that only God had the answer.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: That is striking.
25:03
SPEAKER_01: And it's also, I'm thinking also like how all of these famous converts end up writing like really beautiful fiction, poetry, essays, just um the enthrallment of beauty in all of this.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: And and again, that kind of that freedom that what what it's marked by is a lack of fear, you know.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: Tolkien and Lewis, they're not, oh, there's all of this kind of threatening pagan literature that we have to be careful about.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: They're like, there's all of this richness that can be subsumed into a Christian way of thinking that we can draw upon.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: And if you're looking at it through Christian eyes, you're seeing resounding all kinds of patterns that matter to the Christian faith, and you're enjoying the greatest human thinking and creativity and poetry and mythology, and it's all theirs for you to enjoy as a Christian.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh, there is a kind of um a kind of contagiousness to their willingness to explore and imagine and create.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:08
SPEAKER_01: And the contagiousness element and thinking of intellectual communities.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: We all need intellectual communities and we're shaped by them.
26:15
SPEAKER_01: We're shaped by the books we read.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: So, speaking of that, um, what would what advice would you give to someone who picks up uh the everlasting man for the first time today?
26:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would say just try to enjoy where Chesterton wants to take you.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: Don't come to the book saying, I want to get this particular thing out of it.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: I want to learn how to answer this question or answer this objection or do this thing, but just say, I'm gonna settle in and let a great mind influence me.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: What does he want me to think about?
26:49
SPEAKER_00: What does he want me to say?
26:50
SPEAKER_00: And what is the way he wants to say it?
26:52
SPEAKER_00: Paying attention to the way Chesserton says something is very profitable and important.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: If you're trying to just kind of distill it down to, okay, here's the argument, you're missing the point partially.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: Because part of the point is that the way he's let the argument unfold is also teaching you something.
27:09
SPEAKER_01: That's really, that's really good.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: And uh it's a reminder of how different it is, or maybe just the expectations we have when we pick up a book of apologetics.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: You're expecting, like, okay, there will be a list of questions and a list of answers, and we are ready as Christians to go be deployed with these ready-made answers.
27:29
SPEAKER_01: And of course, Chesterton does not do that.
27:31
SPEAKER_01: It really is not a typical work of apologetics.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I did a book once uh called Twicis of Doubt on 19th century atheists who came to faith.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I learned from that was that everybody has to answer their own doubts and skepticism in their own way because their mind is distinctive.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: So you can learn a lot and be influenced, and people certainly are, by Christian thinkers, but rarely is it like I have this objection and then this person has perfectly answered it, and now I don't have it anymore.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: It's usually I've taken some things they've said and I've reconfigured them in my mind, and I explained it to myself this way, and now I have my own way of thinking about that problem.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, I think apologetics doesn't really work in a straight line.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and often it works as a form of witness.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: A part of the secret is, well, they're a very smart person, and they just feel comfortable in their own skin as a Christian.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: And that tells me that's possible.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: And now I need to find my way to be that kind of person as well.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: In other words, Chesterton's most powerful witness was just being a joyful Christian.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: Being unafraid.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, having no understanding the arguments, not shirking them, not hiding from them, but not being afraid of them.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: That's really encouraging to think about.
28:48
SPEAKER_01: So let's move a little bit uh to kind of the broader context, which will take us to your own work.
28:54
SPEAKER_01: So we mentioned earlier in this conversation the importance of Chesterton's context, obviously writing right after World War I, which really shaped him, shaped H.T.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: Wells and other thinkers around.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: And that's um that broader question, the role of faith in thinking about the war, is something that has been on your mind a lot over the past few years.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: And so your new book, The Fires of Moloch, Anglican Clergyman in the Furnace of World War I, is coming at the end of this year.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about this project, which kind of gets into a similar sort of questions like, how do you think about faith in a world in crisis?
29:32
SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: That's that's very kind.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, the title, just to like close a loop in our conversation, is actually referencing a line from H.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: G.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: Wells, who writes a novel during the war, and he has a character say, We have sent our sons into the fires of Moloch.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: Moloch, of course, is a Canaanite god, and there are references in the Old Testament to this kind of ritual of sending your children into the fire of Moloch.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: And so that's his metaphor for the war.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: The war is this evil thing that we've somehow allowed our children to be subjected to.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: Why has that happened?
30:09
SPEAKER_00: So, of course, there's so much literature, the dominant narrative that we have is that the war is disillusioning.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: And of course, it was disillusioning.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: We've talked about that already.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: It was disillusioning with the idea of progress, with this kind of sense that everything is just kind of naturally getting better and better, a kind of like misguided understanding of uh Darwinism is part of that.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: But people assume that it was disillusioning in the sense that a widespread response was that people lost their faith.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: And that is just not true when you look into it.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: Um actually, it's more the opposite.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: People renewed their faith uh is a more common response to the war than losing their faith, if you really kind of dig into the primary sources.
30:55
SPEAKER_00: So the section of the book that I think I'm most uh excited about kind of getting people thinking about is a section on prayer.
31:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh, because again, if you if you ask people, like, tell me about World War I and prayer, they would say, Oh, people realize that prayer doesn't work.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: They prayed and that the war would stop, but the war didn't stop, and then that's when you learn that prayer is ineffective and you become disillusioned and you become secular.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: That's not what happens.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I in it obviously you could find an individual who that's their story, but what is the collective story overall?
31:29
SPEAKER_00: What I found was uh the soldiers were very keen to pray.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: Everybody um bears witness to the fact that the soldiers pray regularly.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: Even those who will say, oh, the soldiers are godless, you shouldn't think of them as Christians will will admit, oh, well, they pray, of course they pray.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: Everybody prays, you know.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: Um and what they're most interested in is not this kind of philosophical or theological question, you know, does prayer work?
31:55
SPEAKER_00: Does God answer prayer?
31:56
SPEAKER_00: Is prayer real?
31:57
SPEAKER_00: But they want to know how to pray effectively.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Can you teach us to pray?
32:01
SPEAKER_00: Is their question over and over again.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: And chaplains spend loads of time teaching soldiers to pray.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: Uh, there is a widespread, very popular dissemination of written prayers.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of people would soldiers would carry a prayer in their cap underneath their head, you know, like so I have this prayer that I can draw on literally when I need a prayer.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: I've got one right here.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: All of all these anthologies of prayer, which were being published and disseminated and widely used.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh so yeah, I think the war um has been misunderstood in lots of ways.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: And what comes out of the war uh is actually people thinking about faith um and renewing faith rather than a kind of widespread loss of faith?
32:42
SPEAKER_01: That's striking.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that definitely is not an aspect of World War I that I've thought about.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: To conclude, final fun question for you.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: What classic book, whether fiction or nonfiction, do you wish you had written?
32:55
SPEAKER_01: And most importantly, why?
32:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, I I I I do have uh a clear answer to that.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it's from Charles Dickens.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: I am a Victorian scholar, but I'm not, and I do like uh Dickens' novels.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: I reread them occasionally and enjoy them, but I'm not a hardcore Dickens fan by a long way.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh, if I was trapped on a desert island and only could have the novels of one Victorian, I would take uh Anthony Trollope over Dickens, so a confession of that.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: But my answer unequivocally, very clearly, is a Christmas carol.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: I just think it is the most stunning thing that I so wish I had written.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: And again, it's so different from Dickens, partly because he was so verbose.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: He was paid by the word, and so he'd love to just, you know, you'd spend like, you know, seemingly it would feel to me as a child, you know, reading them like, oh, we just spent a whole chapter describing the door before we opened it, you know, and now we're getting the scene is really getting stretched out, you know.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so, but it's short, it's a novella, and it's such a gripping, moving story, and it it is a true classic, the way we talked about it at the beginning of this conversation, Nadia.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, I can reread it over and over again.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: I could happily reread it every Christmas season.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I I've watched endless productions of it, live stage productions and film versions.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's so many quotable lines.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: Um uh my family, we often say to one another, let's keep the feast in our heart all year long.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: Um during during different times of the year, uh, when we're remembering we just went to Peru and we bought a nativity scene, a Peruvian nativity scene uh with uh llamas there uh with the baby Jesus in the stable.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: And we're like, we're keeping the feast in our heart all year long.
34:38
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: Years ago we went to uh a live nativity in Georgia just um that a church put on, and they had a llama and an alpaca.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: It's like because why not?
34:49
SPEAKER_00: Like any animals you have around.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: It's pretty standard in Peruvian uh nativity scenes.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh so there you go.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: There you go.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you so much, Dan.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm gonna hijack you.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: Can you can you can you I'm gonna turn that last one around?
35:03
SPEAKER_00: What is your answer?
35:03
SPEAKER_00: What's the classic you wish you had written?
35:05
SPEAKER_01: That's a really good question because there are so many.
35:09
SPEAKER_01: I keep I keep rereading Virgil's ANIA differently, like in every season of life, and just relating to a completely different character every time.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: And I'm also just stunned by Virgil's patience in writing.
35:24
SPEAKER_01: Because apparently, for most of his career, he he averaged, and I mean, some of this may be just like totally apocryphal because how can we know?
35:33
SPEAKER_01: But um, Word, Word on the Ancient Street is that he averaged about two lines of poetry per day for his most of his career.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: But by the time he gets to the Aeneid, his masterpiece, he's averaging one line a day.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking, like, yeah, can you imagine?
35:50
SPEAKER_01: But it's such stunning poetry.
35:52
SPEAKER_01: And then when he like he dies before he fully finished revising, so he tells uh Augustus, like, please burn this.
35:58
SPEAKER_01: And thankfully he did not.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: Right, absolutely, thankfully, thankfully.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: So But I guess that's the classic.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: Do you think you ever might do your own translation?
36:07
SPEAKER_01: That's a thought.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: I have not thought about that.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, the thing is, translation requires a whole another set of skills.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: Like you don't just know the language and can read it, but you have to have poetic ability that I just do not possess.
36:21
SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's why I appreciate it so much.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, beautiful.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you so much, Tim.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: And thank you for hijacking the end too.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
36:30
SPEAKER_01: Like this is um, this feels so Chestertonian.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: Like you just flip the script on me.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: That's what he does so often.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it is.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: People are so confident that Christians don't have the answers a thing.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, you know, secular people don't have any answers for any of these things, you know.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: They don't they don't understand uh basic questions about meaning and morality in life.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: But the whole point is we don't have to know all the answers.