What's and How's

This post was originally written as a comment on a post of the Blog of the American Chesterton Society. I've edited it just a bit and thought I'd put it in my own blog about why I think Chesterton is a worthy subject of study and why he...well, the rest speaks for itself.

Part of the reason why Chesterton remains relevant almost a century later is just because he didn't only teach what to think. He taught/teaches us how to think about the world, which makes him by far a better teacher.

On the day I originally tried to post, I'd just heard a lecture concerning Tolkien and how he, oddly enough, claimed to not like allegory. We got into this great discussion on the nature of meaning and truth presented in story and whether meaning can be present that the author may never have intended. What came to me was rather Chestertonian: we believe something is true not just because one thing proves it, but because everything proves it.

I'm studying Chaucer this summer, which of course means I'm reading Chesterton on Chaucer. In speaking of the past he says that

“medieval morality was full of the idea that one thing must balance another, that each stood on the side or the other of something that was in the middle, and something that remained in the middle. There might be any amount of movement, but it was the movement round this central thing; perpetually altering the attitudes, but perpetually preserving the balance.”

From a Christian perspective, if something is true, it is true on any level, at any time—whether medieval or modern. It is as if any thing which is true falls within this great system, all moving around this central thing—truth, reality—and like a clock, all the gears clicking into place in order for them to continue keeping time. Which is what led me to want to comment on whether Chesterton teaches the what to think or the how to think. Of course there are things he wrote about that we can be guided by. But I think that from the other side of eternity, he would be more pleased to know that he taught us to think for ourselves—how to apply the principles of this glorious, systematic, ordered, orchestrated universe to the little pieces that we come across every day, seeing how they fit into the dramatic whole.