CHESTERTON, GILBERT KEITH. – English writer, born in London on 29 May 1874, died in Beaconsfield on 14 June 1936. After his early studies at St Paul’s School, he attended the Slade School of Art and some university lectures, though not in order to obtain a degree, and devoted himself entirely to journalism. After a brief period of doubts and uncertainties in his youth, he became a fervent Anglican, and in 1922 converted to Catholicism.
His religion was militant. A first-rate polemicist, he expressed his polemics above all in essays, collected over time in volumes, among which may be mentioned: Tremendous Trifles (1909), Fancies versus Fads (1923), Generally Speaking (1928), The Thing (1929), The Well and the Shallows (1935). More unified in character are Orthodoxy (1908), written during his Anglican period, The Everlasting Man (1925), to be regarded as a continuation and complement of Orthodoxy, composed during his Catholic period, and The Resurrection of Rome (1930), an apology and glorification of all that the Church has done through the centuries, from the defence of dogma to the protection of the arts. C.’s vision of life may be represented by the sentence that concludes the essay Is Humanism a Religion? (republished in The Thing), in which the Church is indicated as the sole institution within which true humanism can be realized. After asking himself: « What will prevent one humanist from wishing for chastity without humility, another for humility without chastity, and another from accepting truth or beauty without either of the two? », he continues: « The problem of a lasting ethic and culture consists in finding the arrangement of pieces that stand in relation to one another like the stones of an arch. And I know only one scheme that has proved its solidity in this sense, traversing lands and ages with its gigantic arches and carrying everywhere the broad river of Baptism in the channel of a Roman aqueduct ». The interweaving of human and Christian values is the characteristic of C.’s writing, whether in novels or detective stories (from the confused The Man who was Thursday [1908], through the stories of Fr. Brown, the priest-detective, to Manalive [1911]), or in biographies (R. Browning [1903], C. Dickens [1906], G. B. Shaw [1909], St. Francis of Assisi [1923], Chaucer [1932], St. Thomas Aquinas [1933]), or in poetry (his most ambitious poem is the one devoted to the deeds of Alfred the Great, The Ballad of the White Horse [1911]), or in the essays already mentioned. C. also edited his own weekly, G. K.'s Weekly.