Thursday’s Father

G.K. Chesterton, ca. 1920

Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

G.K. Chesterton

Theologian

by Aidan Nichols
Second Spring, 240 pp., $19.95

It is said that the study of metaphysics is dying because people no longer want to study things that cannot be changed. One sees this in the popularity of the Serenity Prayer, in which the thing most feared is not, as with the Lord’s Prayer, the temptation to sin, but rather the inability to control one’s circumstances: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

Had G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) lived to read the Serenity Prayer (it emerged shortly after his death), he would have found it ironic that the orison earned fame as the mantra of the recovery movement. Coming of age in an era when preening poets went Wilde wearing carnations the color of the bilious liquor they imbibed, Chesterton recognized early on that the true subversion was sanity. “Revolt in the abstract is—revolting,” says his protagonist Gabriel Syme in The Man Who Was Thursday (1907). “It’s mere vomiting. . . . The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”

Such an appreciation of the artfulness of “things going right” characterizes the brand of metaphysical realism that Aidan Nichols, the English Dominican priest and prolific author, identifies as central to Chesterton’s worldview. In G. K. Chesterton, Theologian, he traces the origins of that realism back to the literary giant’s personal background and his reactions to the leading cultural figures of his time. Nichols’s Thomistic talent for systematizing leads him to find connections between Chesterton’s use of paradox, his demonstration of God’s existence (the “argument from joy”), his understanding of man as imago dei, and his Christology.