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The Everlasting Man
What, if anything, is it that makes the human uniquely human? This, in part, is the question that G.K. Chesterton starts with in this classic exploration of human history. Responding to the evolutionary materialism of his contemporary (and antagonist) H.G. Wells, Chesterton in this work affirms human uniqueness and the unique message of the Christian faith. Writing in a time when social Darwinism was rampant, Chesterton instead argued that the idea that society has been steadily progressing from a state of primitivism and barbarity towards civilization is simply and flatly inaccurate. "Barbarism and civilization were not successive stages in the progress of the world," he affirms, with arguments drawn from the histories of both Egypt and Babylon.
As always with Chesterton, there is in this analysis something (as he said of Blake) "very plain and emphatic." He sees in Christianity a rare blending of philosophy and mythology, or reason and story, which satisfies both the mind and the heart. On both levels it rings true. As he puts it, "in answer to the historical query of why it was accepted, and is accepted, I answer for millions of others in my reply; because it fits the lock; because it is like life." Here, as so often in Chesterton, we sense a lived, awakened faith. All that he writes derives from a keen intellect guided by the heart's own knowledge.
260 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1925
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About the author
G.K. Chesterton
4,270 books5,650 followersGilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic.
He was educated at St. Paul’s, and went to art school at University College London. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly.
Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology.
He was educated at St. Paul’s, and went to art school at University College London. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly.
Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,031 reviews
July 26, 2007
Men and women have become Christians solely from reading this one book. If you are not a Christian, beware this book. It will possibly convert you. If it does not, then it will probably irreparably harden your heart. A book to save you eternally or to damn you to hell forever. Amazing.
July 22, 2008
Was Jesus the son of God? I think one of the most fascinating attempts to answer that question was mounted in the early 20th century by the two famous friends and literary rivals HG Wells and GK Chesterton, respectively the agnostic extraordinaire and the Catholic par excellence. For Wells, so emphatic was his need to debunk the notion of Christ's divinity that he took a break from his novels and switched to a series of writings on history, the most famous of which ws his "Outline of History." Chesterton responded to his friend's writings regularly, diplomatically, and I think brilliantly. By 1925, both men were famous authors and their theological skirmishes in the pages of their respective books had sharpened into the form of their two respective masterpieces, Wells' Outline, and Chesterton's "The Everlasating Man."
If you've ever had a panic attack combined with headache and chills while listening to a skeptic who says that all religions are equivalent forms of the same old junk competing for the attention of the brainless sheep, or if you've ever been suddenly nauseated by your complete inability to respond when someone suggests that all world religions have a sliver of the truth in them, then you might consider reading this. You should read all of Chesterton for that matter. This book, along with his famous "Orthodoxy," is a crystal clear glass of iced Evian in a world parched to the edge of death by cultural relativism. Long before CS Lewis had even begun his career in Christianity, he read and admired "The Everlasting Man," and he later stated that he found it the singlemost persuasive work of Christian apologetics he ever read.
If you've ever had a panic attack combined with headache and chills while listening to a skeptic who says that all religions are equivalent forms of the same old junk competing for the attention of the brainless sheep, or if you've ever been suddenly nauseated by your complete inability to respond when someone suggests that all world religions have a sliver of the truth in them, then you might consider reading this. You should read all of Chesterton for that matter. This book, along with his famous "Orthodoxy," is a crystal clear glass of iced Evian in a world parched to the edge of death by cultural relativism. Long before CS Lewis had even begun his career in Christianity, he read and admired "The Everlasting Man," and he later stated that he found it the singlemost persuasive work of Christian apologetics he ever read.
January 19, 2014
The Everlasting Man is not your typical Christian apologetics classic. I say this because G.K. Chesterton is not aiming to write a pure 'defence of the faith' as it were, but to write a work that better explores the relationship of Christianity to history. It has become something of a fashionable statement to ignore the relevance of Christianity as it pertains to history and so Chesterton sets out to first explore the concept of God and his role as more than merely just another aspect of mythology and then to explore the relationship between God and man as seen in Christ.
Chesterton makes strong arguments and bold arguments. In doing so he highlights the importance of sticking to one's beliefs. That is why I hold onto my beliefs whether they are...fashionable or not. If I allow my views to merely sway with the breeze of popularity, then what kind of truths do I really believe in? In other words, Chesterton explains the necessity of holding fast to Orthodoxy for himself - a view which others can take to heart. Too often when situations arise in modern society the response of an individual is to change their world-view to accommodate such a situation, when perhaps one should change the response and not the view. Otherwise, all it says is 'I have no strong conviction.'
Chesterton makes use of his skill with paradox with such statements as: "Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour, for men will not be martyred for money." There is a sense through Chesterton's writing that he aims to show how Christianity is not another mythology but something different in history. There have been many creation stories, yet how many religions feature the Creator becoming one of his own Creations to save that Creation? That, Chesterton notes, is an interesting kind of paradoxical situation in itself.
Perhaps my favourite quote from this work is found on page four: "When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified not because her children do not sin, but because they do." To me this is perfect in that it explains the one thing I often feel like explaining to people. They look at Christians and Christianity and believe it is about morality or ethics, but the gospel is not a tool for purely creating 'good' or 'morally right' people. As Romans 3:23-24 states "23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." The church should be full of people just as hurt, broken and failing as the world, and it is when the church contains such people that the message of the gospel should be seen...
Of course if you've read this far through my review you'd be aware that this is a book aimed more at Christians or those actively seeking answers to life from various viewpoints. I find that Chesterton is the best writer I have discovered at providing logical and sound reasons for belief. And in doing so he shows that Christianity is special and that faith and logic are not so different as some may believe.
October 7, 2024
2024 Review
I challenged myself in 2024 to re-read the books that impacted me most in my 20s.
Re-reading this one, there are some undertones that don't play well with modern readers, particularly in reference to other cultures. But the heart of the content is truly thought-provoking. This is one of my favorites.
2017 Review
How to explain what it is like reading G. K. Chesterton? It is having your mind blown and your imagination blessed at the same time. It is sentences that need to be re-read because they are both profound and painful. It is feeling like you are being put through a ringer but you'll be better for it at the end.
Clever, challenging, encouraging, even inspiring. That is what it is to read Chesterton. It took me a summer to get through this one but I highly value the chance I got to really dig deep. I'll be coming back, that is for sure!
I challenged myself in 2024 to re-read the books that impacted me most in my 20s.
Re-reading this one, there are some undertones that don't play well with modern readers, particularly in reference to other cultures. But the heart of the content is truly thought-provoking. This is one of my favorites.
2017 Review
How to explain what it is like reading G. K. Chesterton? It is having your mind blown and your imagination blessed at the same time. It is sentences that need to be re-read because they are both profound and painful. It is feeling like you are being put through a ringer but you'll be better for it at the end.
Clever, challenging, encouraging, even inspiring. That is what it is to read Chesterton. It took me a summer to get through this one but I highly value the chance I got to really dig deep. I'll be coming back, that is for sure!
May 4, 2024
This is the first book I've read by noted Catholic author, G. K. Chesterton. His intent in this book is to show, by rationality and logic, how one can arrive at a belief in God and His Church -- how man is a unique creation --- separate and apart in some special beyond that of animals; and to show that Christ and His Church are the means by which man's ultimate needs are fulfilled.
He has interesting points; however, from my point of view, he tends to wax verbose and get off on tangents about philosophy, mythology, and other religious faiths to the detriment of getting to the primary point he seems to heading to.
While I personally found what Chesterton has to say compelling, of course, I would --- I am an Orthodox Christian so the crux of his arguments are going to a man who's already accepted them from my own journey to Christ and His Church. So, instead, I tried looking at the book from the standpoint of an agnostic or atheist skeptical of Christianity, the deity of Christ, the existence of God, the existence of the supernatural, etc.
From that point of view, I'm not sure that an agnostic or atheist would be persuaded, at least, to reexamine some of their own premises for why they believe as they do. In my opinion, C. S. Lewis -- who reportedly was influenced by Chesterton --- does a better job in his works such as "Mere Christianity" and others at taking the reader along a series of logical steps to intellectually arriving at a conclusion to the existence of the supernatural, of God, His Son, and the mission for the Church.
In conclusion, an interesting book, but one that doesn't quite get all the way in what it attempts. Still, I do think that Christians of all traditions may find it worth a read --- as well as the irreligious for, if nothing else to examine their own beliefs against Chesterton's points.
He has interesting points; however, from my point of view, he tends to wax verbose and get off on tangents about philosophy, mythology, and other religious faiths to the detriment of getting to the primary point he seems to heading to.
While I personally found what Chesterton has to say compelling, of course, I would --- I am an Orthodox Christian so the crux of his arguments are going to a man who's already accepted them from my own journey to Christ and His Church. So, instead, I tried looking at the book from the standpoint of an agnostic or atheist skeptical of Christianity, the deity of Christ, the existence of God, the existence of the supernatural, etc.
From that point of view, I'm not sure that an agnostic or atheist would be persuaded, at least, to reexamine some of their own premises for why they believe as they do. In my opinion, C. S. Lewis -- who reportedly was influenced by Chesterton --- does a better job in his works such as "Mere Christianity" and others at taking the reader along a series of logical steps to intellectually arriving at a conclusion to the existence of the supernatural, of God, His Son, and the mission for the Church.
In conclusion, an interesting book, but one that doesn't quite get all the way in what it attempts. Still, I do think that Christians of all traditions may find it worth a read --- as well as the irreligious for, if nothing else to examine their own beliefs against Chesterton's points.
December 9, 2021
This is a five star book but I probably only got three stars worth this time around. I will return until I wrong all 5 stars out of it!
December 31, 2021
I don't understand how this book continues to get such high ratings and still is being praised. Agreed, it clearly contains 'strokes of genius', insights that were cleverly found on the basis of the information available at the time (1925). So I'm not going to dispute that Chesterton had a very sharp mind. But this book is nearly a century old, which is an insurmountable handicap for a work that claims to offer a history of the world. His passages about prehistoric man and about the earliest civilizations are completely obsolete according to current insights. And Chesterton's language is – and I’ll try to stay polite – very derogatory and sometimes utterly racist: for example, he constantly uses the words 'rude savages' when talking about Australian aborigines, and the infamous n-word also crops up regularly. The whole book, exudes an exclusively white, Eurocentric spirit. Now, you can't really blame Chesterton for being a child of his time, but he’s really laying it on thick. And then there’s his horrible, pedantic style, with a constant ridicule of dissenting opinions, especially those based on scientific research (which, by the way, immediately prompted him to make a slight adjustment in an appendix).
Obviously, this is an extremely polemical work, with a single goal: namely jamming it down our throat that with the introduction of Christianity world history has taken a fundamentally different path. I could follow that somewhat philosophically and theologically (but not in the terms Chesterton uses), but historically this just doesn't make sense. I really looked forward to reading this, but unfortunately, it was another disappointment.
For a few, perhaps more positive remarks, see my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Obviously, this is an extremely polemical work, with a single goal: namely jamming it down our throat that with the introduction of Christianity world history has taken a fundamentally different path. I could follow that somewhat philosophically and theologically (but not in the terms Chesterton uses), but historically this just doesn't make sense. I really looked forward to reading this, but unfortunately, it was another disappointment.
For a few, perhaps more positive remarks, see my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
January 20, 2018
What can I possibly write/say about The Everlasting Man that hasn’t already been written/said ever so much better? He is Our LORD and Savior, Jesus Christ of course and this book about Him is supposedly the best writing by G.K. Chesterton. The latter point might be debatable, the first certainly isn’t.
There is one comment. Perhaps it has been made by others, I do not know. But I loved GK’s points about the Caveman and his drawings. Art is a refinement unique to Man and thanks to the explanation here, I will not be able to listen to, read or accept, wild caveman theories again.
The Everlasting Man is an amazing book. Why has it been so long since I read it? I always ask—say—that when I read or listen to something by Chesterton: why don’t I read him more often? The same with Lewis. They are like mental realignments. This is how I need to think ... or I would like to anyway.
Read this. Read it often booklady.
January 2, 2018: Actually listened to the first CD before Christmas but wanted/needed to restart due to time lapse. This is Chesterton after all. I know I read this some time in the distant past, but cannot remember when or find where I recorded the date, so will just approach as if this is my first read. Some sounds familiar; most does not.
There is one comment. Perhaps it has been made by others, I do not know. But I loved GK’s points about the Caveman and his drawings. Art is a refinement unique to Man and thanks to the explanation here, I will not be able to listen to, read or accept, wild caveman theories again.
The Everlasting Man is an amazing book. Why has it been so long since I read it? I always ask—say—that when I read or listen to something by Chesterton: why don’t I read him more often? The same with Lewis. They are like mental realignments. This is how I need to think ... or I would like to anyway.
Read this. Read it often booklady.
January 2, 2018: Actually listened to the first CD before Christmas but wanted/needed to restart due to time lapse. This is Chesterton after all. I know I read this some time in the distant past, but cannot remember when or find where I recorded the date, so will just approach as if this is my first read. Some sounds familiar; most does not.
December 12, 2011
A brilliant study of comparative religion from earliest known human history to recent times. Chesterton looks at the essence of each religion and what makes them different to Christianity, so that you gradually realise that there is very little in which they can be compared, much less considered similar. There is no political correctness is what he says, if there were, the differences would have been neutralised until everything tasted more or less the same.
However, Chesterton may be best read in print and not listened to on audio - Audible's only version was appalling: it was read too fast and with a monotonous intonation that did little for the meaning of the words. The audio seemed to exaggerate (and make inaccessible) Chesterton's repetitive-in-reverse style, for example "Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy." This type of explanation needs to be pondered rather than raced over, which made the audio impenetrable and hard to follow.
Even though I probably didn't catch it all, what I caught planted something profound in my soul. Reviewed for www.GoodReadingGuide.com
June 9, 2016
The Spiritual History of Humanity
9 June 2016
It was quite ironic that as I was reading this book I noticed that a friend of mine was regularly updating his Facebook status with quotes from G.K. Chesterton. Mind you, they weren't any old quotes, they were no doubt quotes that particularly struck him. It is a real shame that he isn't on Goodreads (or has made any mention on Facebook what book he is reading) because no doubt he is reading some Chesterton at this time, I just am not really sure which one it its (though it is no doubt one of his Christian books, and one of the more popular ones at that). Okay, I could have asked him, but my only real interactions with Facebook tend to involve sharing photos of cats and posting blogs and other things (and the occasional remark regarding some place I am visiting).
Anyway, here are a couple of the quotes that he has posted:
Come to think of it, he might just be reading The Everlasting Man as we speak, especially since this is one of those books that is so deep, and so thought provoking, that one simply cannot read it once and get anywhere near enough out of it that one could get out of it. It reminded me of some of C.S. Lewis's works, which can also be incredibly deep, that I had to read twice, or even three times, to really appreciate what he was saying.
Anyway, as I have mentioned in the title of this review, this is a book about the spiritual history of humanity. It is Christian without a doubt, which means that he concludes the book with the argument as to why Christianity is the best religion, and why Christ is the only person worth following. The thing is that I have read many books that have a similar purpose, and other than the afore mentioned C.S. Lewis, these books simply do not seem to have the same punch that Chesterton's carries. I have read many Christain books in my life, and there are very few that I would recommend, let along give away as presents and not feel that I am ramming Christianity down people's throats, yet both Lewis and Chesterton do not make me feel that way.
I thought about this as I was reading the Everlasting Man (and as I was composing this review), and I believe there are two reasons. The first is that they write really, really well. Many, if not all, of the Christian books that I have read these days tend to be very dry and academic (with the exception of Philip Yancey). Sure, many of us read non-fiction, me being one of them, yet Chesterton's writing is almost, if not, poetic. He has this gift of being able to write something in that way that is beautiful, yet incredibly confronting. I feel that many of the Christian authors out there could learn a thing or two from Chesterton, and in fact they probably should consider having some form of writing classes in today's Bible Colleges.
That is the other thing – neither Chesterton nor Lewis were theologically trained. C.S. Lewis was a professor of English Literature and G.K. Chesterton was a journalist. They aren't writing as theologians, they are writing as lay people, and in a way lay people can actually have a much better understanding of Christianity than a pastor who has spent years at Seminary and has a string of letters after his name. In fact I did a couple of subjects at a local Bible College and I have to admit that I hated it. What Bible College was doing was that it was turning my faith from a thing of the heart into a thing of the head, and once one's faith becomes purely academic, one is actually in danger of losing one's faith.
Anyway, there are a few things that struck me in this book, and I wish to talk about some of them,
Cavemen
The thing with Chesterton is that he can be incredibly funny, and his opening chapters on the cavemen were just that. While he does not seek to critise the art of science, he understands that it is just that – art. The problem with prehistory is that we do not have any written records of what happened back then. All we have are some paintings on the wall of a cave and some speculation. In fact it was the paintings on the cave wall that he was poking fun at, namely because the scientists at the time had come up with this idea and were sticking with it, when it fact there could be a number of things behind it, such as it being a nursery (since the walls of nurseries can be covered with pictures of animals), or were simply something that the cavemen (or their kids) scribbled because they were bored.
The other thing he wrote about was this absurd idea that cavemen breed by whacking a woman on the back of her head with a club and then dragging her back to his cave. I'm sure we have all seen something like this:
The problem Chesterton sees is that first of all this is pure mythology. There is actually no evidence that cavemen ever did that. In my mind this poses a further problem, and a problem that we still, unfortunately, face today – it objectifies women. By creating this myth it creates this idea that women are little more than objects that men can take for themselves, forcefully. This suggests that cavemen were little more than animals, and Chesterton doesn't believe that they were – the cave paintings go a long way to prove that. The problem is that there are many, in fact way too many, men who seem to think that this is acceptable behaviour. The furore over the events at Stanford College demonstrate that such attitudes are still alive and well today, even in a supposedly civilised society such as ours. The problem is that such images only serve to reinforce this attitude. We are not animals, we are civilised human beings, and we need to start treating everybody, regardless of gender, race, or class, as civilised human beings.
Merchantalism
Chesterton then progresses through the ages to the conflict between Carthage and Rome. This appears in a chapter entitled 'Gods and Demons'. The interesting thing is that he paints Rome as being a civilisation lead by the gods of the sky, while Carthage was led by the demons of the Earth, in particular Moloch. As an interesting side note he points out how we don't name our children after the heroes of Classical Athens, such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and such, however we use names from the defeated Trojans, such as Paris and Hecktor. No doubt this probably has a lot to do with the Romans claiming descendancy from the Trojans, but as I suggested, this is a side note.
Oh, that's right:
Anyway, I get the impression that Chesterton isn't a big fan of merchantalism with the fact that he connects the Cartheginians to the Near Eastern god Moloch, and child sacrifice. His point is that the Cartheginans were merchants and were ruled by merchant princes, and this was in fact their downfall. No doubt this is a rather (or not too) subtle jab at the British Empire, famously called 'A Nation of Shopkeepers' by Napoleon. The thing is that he has a point – Hannibal was on the verge of destroying Rome, however the merchant princes in Carthage saw that the defeat at Cannae was enough to undermine Rome and saw no need to continue spending money to finance Hannibal's war effort. Since Hannibal was starved of resources, despite having control of the Italian Peninsula, it gave the Romans an opening to launch a counter-attack, one that eventually destroyed Carthage.
We see this absurdity in out world today, with the farcical austerity measures imposed by almost every developed economy. The belief is that to stimulate growth one must cut taxes to businesses, thus starving the government of revenue, and forcing them to cut funding to essential services. Thus governments need money, so they sell of profitable assets to build and maintain infrastructure (selling the house to remodel the kitchen), yet refuse to take on more debt, while cutting interest rates to ridiculous levels to force the private sector to take on more debt (debt is bad for government, but good for the private sector). The problem is that businesses don't always use tax cuts to expand the business, or to grow the economy – in many cases they simply shove the savings into an investment fund for their retirement.
The funny this is that the champion of the neo-liberals, Adam Smith, actually warned against the foly of allowing businessmen to dictate economic policy – they would always do it for their own interests, and when self interested people are given charge of the economy, it always, inventively, suffers.
The Persistence of Christianity
It is very easy for a Christian to get caught up in the idea that it has lasted two thousand years without alteration, but we forget that this is also the case with other regions – Buddhism clocks in at around 2500 years, and Judaism and Hinduism are looking at around 3500 years. The argument then goes that it has lasted 2000 years in its purest form, but once again I would argue against that namely because there is a debate as to what the original Christianity actually was, and not everybody accepts that the Bible is as authentic as Christians claim it is.
The thing with Christianity, or at least what I believe Christianity to be, is that it always seems to revert back to a specific norm. As the faith grew, splinter sects began to appear and to change the original message. While I accept that not everybody is going to agree with me, my basic preposition is that it boils down to one commandment given by Christ – love the Lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself. The problem was that Christianity devolved into be good and you will go to heaven, be bad and you will go to hell (with good and bad being defined by those in power). However, at every turn a grass roots movement would arrive to shift this back to the centre. We saw this happen with the invention of the printing press, and we are seeing it again with the rise of Social Media.
In both periods powerful interest groups had seized control of the faith to exert their own agenda. We saw that with the medieval Catholic Church, and we are seeing it again with the hate fuelled extremist movement. These days so called Christians are running around turning it into a form of libertarian, free market, small government ideology, and certain elements of society – single mothers, the LGBT, foreigners, and many others – are demonised and persecuted. Yet while they are running around persecuting people they are screaming out that they are in fact the ones being persecuted. Yet many Christians who have become sick and tired of this endless dogma are rushing to social media, which is giving them a voice to say 'hey, we aren't actually like that, we aren't a religion of hate, we are a religion of love'. Yet it is still early days – elections aren't won or lost, yet, in the Twittersphere, but the time is coming.
9 June 2016
It was quite ironic that as I was reading this book I noticed that a friend of mine was regularly updating his Facebook status with quotes from G.K. Chesterton. Mind you, they weren't any old quotes, they were no doubt quotes that particularly struck him. It is a real shame that he isn't on Goodreads (or has made any mention on Facebook what book he is reading) because no doubt he is reading some Chesterton at this time, I just am not really sure which one it its (though it is no doubt one of his Christian books, and one of the more popular ones at that). Okay, I could have asked him, but my only real interactions with Facebook tend to involve sharing photos of cats and posting blogs and other things (and the occasional remark regarding some place I am visiting).
Anyway, here are a couple of the quotes that he has posted:
A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith.
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Come to think of it, he might just be reading The Everlasting Man as we speak, especially since this is one of those books that is so deep, and so thought provoking, that one simply cannot read it once and get anywhere near enough out of it that one could get out of it. It reminded me of some of C.S. Lewis's works, which can also be incredibly deep, that I had to read twice, or even three times, to really appreciate what he was saying.
Anyway, as I have mentioned in the title of this review, this is a book about the spiritual history of humanity. It is Christian without a doubt, which means that he concludes the book with the argument as to why Christianity is the best religion, and why Christ is the only person worth following. The thing is that I have read many books that have a similar purpose, and other than the afore mentioned C.S. Lewis, these books simply do not seem to have the same punch that Chesterton's carries. I have read many Christain books in my life, and there are very few that I would recommend, let along give away as presents and not feel that I am ramming Christianity down people's throats, yet both Lewis and Chesterton do not make me feel that way.
I thought about this as I was reading the Everlasting Man (and as I was composing this review), and I believe there are two reasons. The first is that they write really, really well. Many, if not all, of the Christian books that I have read these days tend to be very dry and academic (with the exception of Philip Yancey). Sure, many of us read non-fiction, me being one of them, yet Chesterton's writing is almost, if not, poetic. He has this gift of being able to write something in that way that is beautiful, yet incredibly confronting. I feel that many of the Christian authors out there could learn a thing or two from Chesterton, and in fact they probably should consider having some form of writing classes in today's Bible Colleges.
That is the other thing – neither Chesterton nor Lewis were theologically trained. C.S. Lewis was a professor of English Literature and G.K. Chesterton was a journalist. They aren't writing as theologians, they are writing as lay people, and in a way lay people can actually have a much better understanding of Christianity than a pastor who has spent years at Seminary and has a string of letters after his name. In fact I did a couple of subjects at a local Bible College and I have to admit that I hated it. What Bible College was doing was that it was turning my faith from a thing of the heart into a thing of the head, and once one's faith becomes purely academic, one is actually in danger of losing one's faith.
Anyway, there are a few things that struck me in this book, and I wish to talk about some of them,
Cavemen
The thing with Chesterton is that he can be incredibly funny, and his opening chapters on the cavemen were just that. While he does not seek to critise the art of science, he understands that it is just that – art. The problem with prehistory is that we do not have any written records of what happened back then. All we have are some paintings on the wall of a cave and some speculation. In fact it was the paintings on the cave wall that he was poking fun at, namely because the scientists at the time had come up with this idea and were sticking with it, when it fact there could be a number of things behind it, such as it being a nursery (since the walls of nurseries can be covered with pictures of animals), or were simply something that the cavemen (or their kids) scribbled because they were bored.
The other thing he wrote about was this absurd idea that cavemen breed by whacking a woman on the back of her head with a club and then dragging her back to his cave. I'm sure we have all seen something like this:
The problem Chesterton sees is that first of all this is pure mythology. There is actually no evidence that cavemen ever did that. In my mind this poses a further problem, and a problem that we still, unfortunately, face today – it objectifies women. By creating this myth it creates this idea that women are little more than objects that men can take for themselves, forcefully. This suggests that cavemen were little more than animals, and Chesterton doesn't believe that they were – the cave paintings go a long way to prove that. The problem is that there are many, in fact way too many, men who seem to think that this is acceptable behaviour. The furore over the events at Stanford College demonstrate that such attitudes are still alive and well today, even in a supposedly civilised society such as ours. The problem is that such images only serve to reinforce this attitude. We are not animals, we are civilised human beings, and we need to start treating everybody, regardless of gender, race, or class, as civilised human beings.
Merchantalism
Chesterton then progresses through the ages to the conflict between Carthage and Rome. This appears in a chapter entitled 'Gods and Demons'. The interesting thing is that he paints Rome as being a civilisation lead by the gods of the sky, while Carthage was led by the demons of the Earth, in particular Moloch. As an interesting side note he points out how we don't name our children after the heroes of Classical Athens, such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and such, however we use names from the defeated Trojans, such as Paris and Hecktor. No doubt this probably has a lot to do with the Romans claiming descendancy from the Trojans, but as I suggested, this is a side note.
Oh, that's right:
Anyway, I get the impression that Chesterton isn't a big fan of merchantalism with the fact that he connects the Cartheginians to the Near Eastern god Moloch, and child sacrifice. His point is that the Cartheginans were merchants and were ruled by merchant princes, and this was in fact their downfall. No doubt this is a rather (or not too) subtle jab at the British Empire, famously called 'A Nation of Shopkeepers' by Napoleon. The thing is that he has a point – Hannibal was on the verge of destroying Rome, however the merchant princes in Carthage saw that the defeat at Cannae was enough to undermine Rome and saw no need to continue spending money to finance Hannibal's war effort. Since Hannibal was starved of resources, despite having control of the Italian Peninsula, it gave the Romans an opening to launch a counter-attack, one that eventually destroyed Carthage.
We see this absurdity in out world today, with the farcical austerity measures imposed by almost every developed economy. The belief is that to stimulate growth one must cut taxes to businesses, thus starving the government of revenue, and forcing them to cut funding to essential services. Thus governments need money, so they sell of profitable assets to build and maintain infrastructure (selling the house to remodel the kitchen), yet refuse to take on more debt, while cutting interest rates to ridiculous levels to force the private sector to take on more debt (debt is bad for government, but good for the private sector). The problem is that businesses don't always use tax cuts to expand the business, or to grow the economy – in many cases they simply shove the savings into an investment fund for their retirement.
The funny this is that the champion of the neo-liberals, Adam Smith, actually warned against the foly of allowing businessmen to dictate economic policy – they would always do it for their own interests, and when self interested people are given charge of the economy, it always, inventively, suffers.
The Persistence of Christianity
It is very easy for a Christian to get caught up in the idea that it has lasted two thousand years without alteration, but we forget that this is also the case with other regions – Buddhism clocks in at around 2500 years, and Judaism and Hinduism are looking at around 3500 years. The argument then goes that it has lasted 2000 years in its purest form, but once again I would argue against that namely because there is a debate as to what the original Christianity actually was, and not everybody accepts that the Bible is as authentic as Christians claim it is.
The thing with Christianity, or at least what I believe Christianity to be, is that it always seems to revert back to a specific norm. As the faith grew, splinter sects began to appear and to change the original message. While I accept that not everybody is going to agree with me, my basic preposition is that it boils down to one commandment given by Christ – love the Lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself. The problem was that Christianity devolved into be good and you will go to heaven, be bad and you will go to hell (with good and bad being defined by those in power). However, at every turn a grass roots movement would arrive to shift this back to the centre. We saw this happen with the invention of the printing press, and we are seeing it again with the rise of Social Media.
In both periods powerful interest groups had seized control of the faith to exert their own agenda. We saw that with the medieval Catholic Church, and we are seeing it again with the hate fuelled extremist movement. These days so called Christians are running around turning it into a form of libertarian, free market, small government ideology, and certain elements of society – single mothers, the LGBT, foreigners, and many others – are demonised and persecuted. Yet while they are running around persecuting people they are screaming out that they are in fact the ones being persecuted. Yet many Christians who have become sick and tired of this endless dogma are rushing to social media, which is giving them a voice to say 'hey, we aren't actually like that, we aren't a religion of hate, we are a religion of love'. Yet it is still early days – elections aren't won or lost, yet, in the Twittersphere, but the time is coming.
January 24, 2008
The Everlasting Man is a strange kind of Christian apologetics, which relates the story of man from the beginning of time. Chesterton gives a delightful thrashing to the anthropologists who draw amazing conclusions from minimal evidence; emphasizes that whether or not evolution is true, it offers absolutely no reasonable explanation for the vast divide between man and the animals; pokes some fun at the silliness of comparative religion; and teases the historical critics who draw insupportable claims about the origins of orthodox Christianity.
I was actually more engaged at the beginning of the book than I was as it wore on; he seems to apply most of his wit and humor towards the beginning. At times Chesterton is "too clever," to self-satisfied, too caught up in the beauty of his own language, but there is no denying his wit and his insight, and his zingers do zing. This is entertaining, intellectual apologetics of a kind rarely found; indeed, not found anywhere else that I can think of. Unfortunately, I borrowed it form the library, and so I could not highlight my favorite lines. Perhaps it is just as well, or three-fourths of the book might have been underlined by the end. But from it I take away these points: that the cave man was likely more human than the anthropologists make him out to be; that the academics of comparative religion confuse mythology with actual religious systems; and that Christianity was the first thing to combine, utterly, both philosophy and religion.
The apologetics are somewhat random and lack a clear organization; he seems to say what he thinks when he thinks of it, almost in a train of thought fashion, although there are loose thematic divisions for the chapters. I think Chesterton seems to occasionally fall into the same trap he has criticized others for: attributing psychological motives to people whose motives he could not know. All and all though, an excellent book.
I was actually more engaged at the beginning of the book than I was as it wore on; he seems to apply most of his wit and humor towards the beginning. At times Chesterton is "too clever," to self-satisfied, too caught up in the beauty of his own language, but there is no denying his wit and his insight, and his zingers do zing. This is entertaining, intellectual apologetics of a kind rarely found; indeed, not found anywhere else that I can think of. Unfortunately, I borrowed it form the library, and so I could not highlight my favorite lines. Perhaps it is just as well, or three-fourths of the book might have been underlined by the end. But from it I take away these points: that the cave man was likely more human than the anthropologists make him out to be; that the academics of comparative religion confuse mythology with actual religious systems; and that Christianity was the first thing to combine, utterly, both philosophy and religion.
The apologetics are somewhat random and lack a clear organization; he seems to say what he thinks when he thinks of it, almost in a train of thought fashion, although there are loose thematic divisions for the chapters. I think Chesterton seems to occasionally fall into the same trap he has criticized others for: attributing psychological motives to people whose motives he could not know. All and all though, an excellent book.
May 3, 2025
Such a difficult book to rate, or to even say if I liked it or not. Some passages are irritatingly long-winded and almost incoherent, especially those where he uses sweeping generalizations, pushed through with tremendous energy, as crucial parts of his arguments.
Some other paragraphs, on the other hand, are so jaw-droppingly beautiful and deep that they left me stunned.
It's almost like listening to a hugely erudite but - sorry - slightly drunk evangelist.
In other words, as I found in other books by Chesterton, his intellectual force is tremendous, although scattered and fragmented, not consistent, while it's the emotional force of his writing that is extraordinary and vibrant in every paragraph.
This book was written as a response to HG Wells' The Outline of History. It follows the spiritual journey of Western Civilization, refuting Wells' belief that humans are “only” advanced animals and that Jesus was just an extraordinary human.
How many people today still fall into the same reductionist trap of saying “we are JUST a bunch of atoms”…. “humans are ONLY the product of biological evolution”…? Far too many. And that’s obviously because they don’t understand the concept of God and of being made in His image. They are both not very easy concepts to grasp, especially nowadays.
Part I On the Creature Called Man
I. The Man in the Cave
The cave man is a man like us because of his art, it is only the misrepresentation of the man of science that makes the ‘pre-historic’ man an animal. The slow development of man is in fact more illogical than a swift development, the time of the process has nothing to do with the process itself. In argumentation there is a tactic known as a time shift – a ‘red herring’ where the scope of an issue is trumped by the chronology of the issue. By changing the time-frame, playing the blame game, changing a optimizing decision to a sufficiency decision, the issue is left behind. Chesterton brings the argument away from the time battle to the issue of ‘Is there really a difference between us in the present and those in the past?’
Chapter 2: Professors and Prehistoric Men
Human civilization just like wars are constructed by the victors – however that view is a modern one. Man has always been man with his flaws, solutions, mistakes, and creativity. The issue at hand is the arrival of thought that brings the animal nature to man to explain away religion, because religion is the only thing that explains what it is to be man.
Chapter 3: The Antiquity of Civilization
Babylon and Egypt, two of the earliest civilizations, teach us that civilization does not happen in a linear progressive relationship but in parallel lines. What happens in the past happens today: they had technology, we have technology; they had a waning democracy, we have a waning democracy; they had art and mystery, we have lost that (by choice).
Chapter 4: God and Comparative Religion
In chapter 4 Chesterton links the chronological history talked about in the precious chapter and transitions into a more concrete history – the history of belief. In contrast to belief humanism is the belief in non-belief – and is a modern invention. Man did not create God, but Man did create the lie that he could create himself. The more we separate ourselves from God the more less human we become.
Chapter 5: Man and Mythologies
Now we reach the second category in the division of religions (God; the Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers). Last chapter was God and man’s flight from a ‘Numinous’. In the progress (or regression) of civilizations we reach the next category of ‘the Gods’. There is a hint of something coming, a hero that fulfills the need expressed in these myths – but that world changing event is saved for the second half of the book.
Chapter 6: The Demons and the Philosophers
This chapter is divided into two parts: which are when things get really bad and the attempts to rationalize them. It is said that things are darkest before dawn, but the darkness here is when we as all of mankind fled away from the light and into the shadows.
Chapter 7: The War of Gods and Demons
In this epic clash of the titans Chesterton writes about the earth yearning for a Saviour. The darkness has overtaken the Earth, mankind is about to be crushed out by the Demons – and yet the divine keeps an ember alive for the Christ. Remember that this history is from a secular point of view, this is an ‘outsiders’ perspective. Even from this historic nosebleed section we can still see the stage being set for the most divisive event in history that divided time in two.
Chapter 8: The End of the World
Even after winning the war against the demons man lost the battle he could never win: the battle against his fallen nature. What was won in the overt was lost in the covert. Man’s civilization is fallen and lost. The world would have ended millennia ago if it was not for some assistance from beyond the natural world.
PART 2
Chapter 1: The God in the Cave
These two parts both start in the same way: in a cave. Just as the only thing we know about ‘the caveman’ is through his art, the only thing we know about Christ (remember that the scriptures were wither not written or they were kept secret only open to the Jewish people – as they were the only ones who found value there) is through the art in the cave where he was born. The Christmas story is too close to us, we must stop back and marvel and what happened. It was no peaceful assembly, no little drummer boy, no peaceful onlooking animals – just the ordinary aspects of a dirty cave with dirt and dung everywhere. It was true humility, and yet it brought both division and unity to the world.
Chapter 2: The Riddles of the Gospel
In this book, that really is a reductio ad absurdum argument this chapter takes that approach and applies it to Jesus. In the first part of the book we have found that if man is just an animal then that leads to both the absurd (why would there be religion of any kind then?) and contradictions (why is there art?). In this the second part we see if Christ is just a man, taking the same approach. Now the difficult part about using reductio ad absurdum is that one must only follow the premise. Chesterton does this by (just as he did with man) looking at Christ through a secular point of view until it contradicts itself.
Who is Christ? What do we do with Him? These questions have been the hounds from which we run from. It seems that the light is so bright that we must dim it by putting Christ in a specific box – yet it is the plethora of boxes that confirm that He is more than the sum of the parts we try to put him in. When we look at the gospel we see weird things happen (remember this is from a secular point of view): riddles, statements that make no sense – even to the Jews, stories, the praising of the meek during a military occupation, and so forth. Let us begin the journey to see if Christ was just a man.
Chapter 3: The Strangest Story in the World
The summary of the life of Christ comes to an end. That end though was the whole purpose of his coming. In Man’s point of view Jesus was killed by claiming something that he was – the “I am’. The argument that Jesus’ life was a mere fabrication misses the point that if it was fabricated then it really is an original fabrication. Falsities need something to base themselves off of – yet here is something so frightening so original that we try to water it down.
The new can only rise after the old has passed away. Just as a butterfly can take flight only after the caterpillar is done crawling in the dirt, so our myths, and philosophies were destroyed, annihilated, and even proved false during the life but most assuredly in the death of Christ.
Chapter 4: The Witness of the Heretics
Here in this chapter the church is proved true by an unusual rhetorical technique: Using the attacks against the church to defend the church. When we look at true doctrine, the guiding light of the word, we see that with it we can stand against the world.
Chapter 5: The Escape from Paganism
The path of man and the path of the God in this chapter are contrasted. In the whole first part of this book Man’s path was shown to be a falling (sometimes slow, but mostly a plummet) away from God. The start of the second half was God rescuing man – not only that but all the attempts of man from the first half of history were either shown as complete and utter falsehoods (that had to surrender) or were reconciled. Yet the church at that time in history for the most part were in Europe, the East was left to itself. Thus we can see the great schism, the East shows a world that believes in ‘nothing’ while the West believes in everything, but the church believes in the eternal.
Chapter 6: The Five Deaths of the Faith
When we look at the history of the church to the untrained mind it seems that it continually shaped itself with creeds until it reached something that the people would accept. This is not the case, in fact it is the opposite. The church when ever it went for the popular view died. Then the church came back without the popularity but with the truth. The church cannot be destroyed externally (see last chapter) nor internally. Man cannot destroy the eternal.
Conclusion: The Summary of This Book
A summary of the history of the world: Man is not just an animal, Christ was not just a man – and the divine madness was the sanity that stood against time. Just as a bright light is a searing pain for those adjusted to the darkness, but then reveals all – the church (with Christ as the head) does the same to the world.
Beautiful quote from this chapter: " ...an enormous exception quite unlike anything else. It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; [...] The Man Who Made The World. [...] The most that any primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilization for more than a thousand years - that is something utterly like anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. "
p.s. this is also the book that inspired C.S. Lewis to convert and that suggested to him the famous "JESUS TRILEMMA" (p. 155). Inspired by Chesterton, C.S. Lewis wrote: "You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Some other paragraphs, on the other hand, are so jaw-droppingly beautiful and deep that they left me stunned.
It's almost like listening to a hugely erudite but - sorry - slightly drunk evangelist.
In other words, as I found in other books by Chesterton, his intellectual force is tremendous, although scattered and fragmented, not consistent, while it's the emotional force of his writing that is extraordinary and vibrant in every paragraph.
This book was written as a response to HG Wells' The Outline of History. It follows the spiritual journey of Western Civilization, refuting Wells' belief that humans are “only” advanced animals and that Jesus was just an extraordinary human.
How many people today still fall into the same reductionist trap of saying “we are JUST a bunch of atoms”…. “humans are ONLY the product of biological evolution”…? Far too many. And that’s obviously because they don’t understand the concept of God and of being made in His image. They are both not very easy concepts to grasp, especially nowadays.
Part I On the Creature Called Man
I. The Man in the Cave
The cave man is a man like us because of his art, it is only the misrepresentation of the man of science that makes the ‘pre-historic’ man an animal. The slow development of man is in fact more illogical than a swift development, the time of the process has nothing to do with the process itself. In argumentation there is a tactic known as a time shift – a ‘red herring’ where the scope of an issue is trumped by the chronology of the issue. By changing the time-frame, playing the blame game, changing a optimizing decision to a sufficiency decision, the issue is left behind. Chesterton brings the argument away from the time battle to the issue of ‘Is there really a difference between us in the present and those in the past?’
Chapter 2: Professors and Prehistoric Men
Human civilization just like wars are constructed by the victors – however that view is a modern one. Man has always been man with his flaws, solutions, mistakes, and creativity. The issue at hand is the arrival of thought that brings the animal nature to man to explain away religion, because religion is the only thing that explains what it is to be man.
Chapter 3: The Antiquity of Civilization
Babylon and Egypt, two of the earliest civilizations, teach us that civilization does not happen in a linear progressive relationship but in parallel lines. What happens in the past happens today: they had technology, we have technology; they had a waning democracy, we have a waning democracy; they had art and mystery, we have lost that (by choice).
Chapter 4: God and Comparative Religion
In chapter 4 Chesterton links the chronological history talked about in the precious chapter and transitions into a more concrete history – the history of belief. In contrast to belief humanism is the belief in non-belief – and is a modern invention. Man did not create God, but Man did create the lie that he could create himself. The more we separate ourselves from God the more less human we become.
Chapter 5: Man and Mythologies
Now we reach the second category in the division of religions (God; the Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers). Last chapter was God and man’s flight from a ‘Numinous’. In the progress (or regression) of civilizations we reach the next category of ‘the Gods’. There is a hint of something coming, a hero that fulfills the need expressed in these myths – but that world changing event is saved for the second half of the book.
Chapter 6: The Demons and the Philosophers
This chapter is divided into two parts: which are when things get really bad and the attempts to rationalize them. It is said that things are darkest before dawn, but the darkness here is when we as all of mankind fled away from the light and into the shadows.
Chapter 7: The War of Gods and Demons
In this epic clash of the titans Chesterton writes about the earth yearning for a Saviour. The darkness has overtaken the Earth, mankind is about to be crushed out by the Demons – and yet the divine keeps an ember alive for the Christ. Remember that this history is from a secular point of view, this is an ‘outsiders’ perspective. Even from this historic nosebleed section we can still see the stage being set for the most divisive event in history that divided time in two.
Chapter 8: The End of the World
Even after winning the war against the demons man lost the battle he could never win: the battle against his fallen nature. What was won in the overt was lost in the covert. Man’s civilization is fallen and lost. The world would have ended millennia ago if it was not for some assistance from beyond the natural world.
PART 2
Chapter 1: The God in the Cave
These two parts both start in the same way: in a cave. Just as the only thing we know about ‘the caveman’ is through his art, the only thing we know about Christ (remember that the scriptures were wither not written or they were kept secret only open to the Jewish people – as they were the only ones who found value there) is through the art in the cave where he was born. The Christmas story is too close to us, we must stop back and marvel and what happened. It was no peaceful assembly, no little drummer boy, no peaceful onlooking animals – just the ordinary aspects of a dirty cave with dirt and dung everywhere. It was true humility, and yet it brought both division and unity to the world.
Chapter 2: The Riddles of the Gospel
In this book, that really is a reductio ad absurdum argument this chapter takes that approach and applies it to Jesus. In the first part of the book we have found that if man is just an animal then that leads to both the absurd (why would there be religion of any kind then?) and contradictions (why is there art?). In this the second part we see if Christ is just a man, taking the same approach. Now the difficult part about using reductio ad absurdum is that one must only follow the premise. Chesterton does this by (just as he did with man) looking at Christ through a secular point of view until it contradicts itself.
Who is Christ? What do we do with Him? These questions have been the hounds from which we run from. It seems that the light is so bright that we must dim it by putting Christ in a specific box – yet it is the plethora of boxes that confirm that He is more than the sum of the parts we try to put him in. When we look at the gospel we see weird things happen (remember this is from a secular point of view): riddles, statements that make no sense – even to the Jews, stories, the praising of the meek during a military occupation, and so forth. Let us begin the journey to see if Christ was just a man.
Chapter 3: The Strangest Story in the World
The summary of the life of Christ comes to an end. That end though was the whole purpose of his coming. In Man’s point of view Jesus was killed by claiming something that he was – the “I am’. The argument that Jesus’ life was a mere fabrication misses the point that if it was fabricated then it really is an original fabrication. Falsities need something to base themselves off of – yet here is something so frightening so original that we try to water it down.
The new can only rise after the old has passed away. Just as a butterfly can take flight only after the caterpillar is done crawling in the dirt, so our myths, and philosophies were destroyed, annihilated, and even proved false during the life but most assuredly in the death of Christ.
Chapter 4: The Witness of the Heretics
Here in this chapter the church is proved true by an unusual rhetorical technique: Using the attacks against the church to defend the church. When we look at true doctrine, the guiding light of the word, we see that with it we can stand against the world.
Chapter 5: The Escape from Paganism
The path of man and the path of the God in this chapter are contrasted. In the whole first part of this book Man’s path was shown to be a falling (sometimes slow, but mostly a plummet) away from God. The start of the second half was God rescuing man – not only that but all the attempts of man from the first half of history were either shown as complete and utter falsehoods (that had to surrender) or were reconciled. Yet the church at that time in history for the most part were in Europe, the East was left to itself. Thus we can see the great schism, the East shows a world that believes in ‘nothing’ while the West believes in everything, but the church believes in the eternal.
Chapter 6: The Five Deaths of the Faith
When we look at the history of the church to the untrained mind it seems that it continually shaped itself with creeds until it reached something that the people would accept. This is not the case, in fact it is the opposite. The church when ever it went for the popular view died. Then the church came back without the popularity but with the truth. The church cannot be destroyed externally (see last chapter) nor internally. Man cannot destroy the eternal.
Conclusion: The Summary of This Book
A summary of the history of the world: Man is not just an animal, Christ was not just a man – and the divine madness was the sanity that stood against time. Just as a bright light is a searing pain for those adjusted to the darkness, but then reveals all – the church (with Christ as the head) does the same to the world.
Beautiful quote from this chapter: " ...an enormous exception quite unlike anything else. It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; [...] The Man Who Made The World. [...] The most that any primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilization for more than a thousand years - that is something utterly like anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. "
p.s. this is also the book that inspired C.S. Lewis to convert and that suggested to him the famous "JESUS TRILEMMA" (p. 155). Inspired by Chesterton, C.S. Lewis wrote: "You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
August 22, 2007
Chesterton is a genius. Period.
This book, more than most others that are on the subject of Christian apologetics, blew me away. I can't really put into words anything more than that. Maybe until I read it again. My mind was just stretched to its limits in the scope and density of his arguments.
Chesterton covers every argument for Christ & Christianity and its need and place in history.
I recommend this book to any Christian and most especially to any Catholic to read in their lifetime. At some point, take the challenge. Read this then go on and read "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis (who was very much influenced by G.K. Chesterton)
The only question I asked my wife when I was finished was: Where in the world are the people like Chesterton in today's Christian world?
This book, more than most others that are on the subject of Christian apologetics, blew me away. I can't really put into words anything more than that. Maybe until I read it again. My mind was just stretched to its limits in the scope and density of his arguments.
Chesterton covers every argument for Christ & Christianity and its need and place in history.
I recommend this book to any Christian and most especially to any Catholic to read in their lifetime. At some point, take the challenge. Read this then go on and read "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis (who was very much influenced by G.K. Chesterton)
The only question I asked my wife when I was finished was: Where in the world are the people like Chesterton in today's Christian world?
March 19, 2015
There are some writers you must read them to learn what it means to think,what it means to argue,how to keep your guns intact at all moments.Nietzsche,Adorno,Lawrence,Chesterton are few among them.Reading Adorno and Chesterton and Nietzsche are an exercise to mind to learn how to think.As far i know Chesterton was a most potential opponent of Nietzsche and a strong defendant of Christianity.Its very hard not to be absorbed by him whenever you read him.Only when i read Chesterton and Nietzsche together i understand why truth is a paradox.The insights which Chesterton brought to things or Nietzsche brought to things both were fascinating and true and same time very opposite to each other.Nietzsche want us admire the strong,Chesterton want us to despise the strong.Nietzsche pity the meek who want to inherit the earth.Chesterton question the meek who was not meek enough to inherit the earth.Its quite fun and challenging to read both together until you go mad.By reading both you learn what it means to take a stand and hold the guns!!!
October 1, 2015
This is a masterpiece. It is a focused walk through the story of mankind.
I think that I will use this with my beginning scholars as an orientation to world history.
I will forever understand that man always begins in a cave. Chesterton has given me a powerful understanding of why Christ was born in a stable (rather than A field, the woods, a home or a palace).
I have a new confidence and peace and sense of hope for my own time knowing that it is only natural that Christendom will go through a great many evolutions and series of deaths but that it will always have a resurrection.
As Chesterton says, ours is a God who knows His way out of the grave.
Fulton Sheen preached on the same truth as Chesterton does here. For every Good Friday we know Easter Sunday is guaranteed.
I think that I will use this with my beginning scholars as an orientation to world history.
I will forever understand that man always begins in a cave. Chesterton has given me a powerful understanding of why Christ was born in a stable (rather than A field, the woods, a home or a palace).
I have a new confidence and peace and sense of hope for my own time knowing that it is only natural that Christendom will go through a great many evolutions and series of deaths but that it will always have a resurrection.
As Chesterton says, ours is a God who knows His way out of the grave.
Fulton Sheen preached on the same truth as Chesterton does here. For every Good Friday we know Easter Sunday is guaranteed.
July 12, 2018
Third time's the charm ... or rather the re-charm! This time I read the actual print version and found it just as good, if not better, than the audio I'd always used before. A few paragraphs before my day began always gave me a little nugget to ponder. This is an incredibly rich book which made me wonder if it was, in a way, Chesterton's version of City of God by St. Augustine. Not that Chesterton would do that, but having listened to a Great Course on City of God while reading this, I couldn't help but make the comparison.
Anyway, definitely worth reading just to get your world view shaken up in a most unexpected way.
=========
Rereading ... or rather relistening. I'm being blown away once again.
Original review is below.
=========
Having finished Chesterton's book about St. Francis of Assisi, I looked for a copy of this one, which I've always found the most intriguing concept of all his books: a study of comparative religion against the backdrop of history, as compared to Christianity.
I was really surprised to find the first chapter meshing incredibly well with Jurassic Park, which I am just finishing up for the umpteenth time. This was made by Chesterton's point about what scientists of the day said was typical caveman behavior (beating women, dragging them by hair, etc.) versus the actual evidence of paintings done in caves. As one of the main points of Jurassic Park is that scientists make a lot of decisions based on their preconceptions versus actual reality, the caveman argument really hit home. One wonders if Michael Crichton read much G.K. Chesterton.
I can really see how this would have been an influence on C.S. Lewis.
I listened to the John Franklyn-Robbins narration; it was incredible.
Anyway, definitely worth reading just to get your world view shaken up in a most unexpected way.
=========
Rereading ... or rather relistening. I'm being blown away once again.
Original review is below.
=========
Having finished Chesterton's book about St. Francis of Assisi, I looked for a copy of this one, which I've always found the most intriguing concept of all his books: a study of comparative religion against the backdrop of history, as compared to Christianity.
I was really surprised to find the first chapter meshing incredibly well with Jurassic Park, which I am just finishing up for the umpteenth time. This was made by Chesterton's point about what scientists of the day said was typical caveman behavior (beating women, dragging them by hair, etc.) versus the actual evidence of paintings done in caves. As one of the main points of Jurassic Park is that scientists make a lot of decisions based on their preconceptions versus actual reality, the caveman argument really hit home. One wonders if Michael Crichton read much G.K. Chesterton.
I can really see how this would have been an influence on C.S. Lewis.
I listened to the John Franklyn-Robbins narration; it was incredible.
March 29, 2017
I mean it was C. S. Lewis who said: "for me a book is of no use if I don't read it at least two or three times".
Well, I only can agree to the uttermost with Lewis.
Particularly "the everlasting man" by G. K. Chesterton is a classic candidate for rereading it several times....
The book himself enjoys a classic status. Here Chesterton displays masterfully his keen, winning and engaging wit, and tantalizes us trough his amazing and eloquent gift as one of the best Christians apologetics writer ever!!
"The everlasting Man" will left you behind with an huge amount of information and data, but it also will provide and open for you conclusions and inferences you would never have seen without it.
In his book Chesterton analyses and compare the history of mankind as told by the so called scientist, versus the Christian perspective about creation and the unfolding of men....
Friends, I love this book!!!
The only reason I haven't given it 5 stars, exist only in not having enough capacity to grasp its richness by reading it only one time.
But, I tell you something, what I have been able to grasp is amazing.
A rewarding reading experience full of insights awaits you!!!
Fluently and gripping written it will not disappoint.
Recommendation not only for believers, but for all who thirst for the truth and reality.....
Dean:)
Well, I only can agree to the uttermost with Lewis.
Particularly "the everlasting man" by G. K. Chesterton is a classic candidate for rereading it several times....
The book himself enjoys a classic status. Here Chesterton displays masterfully his keen, winning and engaging wit, and tantalizes us trough his amazing and eloquent gift as one of the best Christians apologetics writer ever!!
"The everlasting Man" will left you behind with an huge amount of information and data, but it also will provide and open for you conclusions and inferences you would never have seen without it.
In his book Chesterton analyses and compare the history of mankind as told by the so called scientist, versus the Christian perspective about creation and the unfolding of men....
Friends, I love this book!!!
The only reason I haven't given it 5 stars, exist only in not having enough capacity to grasp its richness by reading it only one time.
But, I tell you something, what I have been able to grasp is amazing.
A rewarding reading experience full of insights awaits you!!!
Fluently and gripping written it will not disappoint.
Recommendation not only for believers, but for all who thirst for the truth and reality.....
Dean:)
December 12, 2018
I've read over a dozen books by Chesterton, but The Everlasting Man was one of the toughest to get through. Written as a rebuttal to H.G. Wells An Outline of History, Chesterton wrote the book to refute the idea that man is merely a part of the animal kingdom and that Jesus Christ was just an influential teacher.
Unfortunately the first half on the development of man and religion is quite a slog. If you can hang on until the chapter on the incarnation, "God in the Cave," you will be richly rewarded with G.K.'s insights into the first Christmas and into the incarnation. Some of it is simply astonishing.
Unfortunately the first half on the development of man and religion is quite a slog. If you can hang on until the chapter on the incarnation, "God in the Cave," you will be richly rewarded with G.K.'s insights into the first Christmas and into the incarnation. Some of it is simply astonishing.
October 30, 2019
Re-read 2018-08-05
The first thing I ever read of Chesterton's was a chapter from this book titled "God in a Cave", so I have a great fondness for this books and my introduction to Chesterton.
As this is another re-read of this, my love of this goes much farther than fondness. His "outline of history" in response to his friend H.G. Well's book still pertains as much today as ever. This sweeping birds eye view of history presents a rather odd apologetic and a way of seeing things so simple that you pass over them. Masterful and just plain fun.
The first thing I ever read of Chesterton's was a chapter from this book titled "God in a Cave", so I have a great fondness for this books and my introduction to Chesterton.
As this is another re-read of this, my love of this goes much farther than fondness. His "outline of history" in response to his friend H.G. Well's book still pertains as much today as ever. This sweeping birds eye view of history presents a rather odd apologetic and a way of seeing things so simple that you pass over them. Masterful and just plain fun.
September 18, 2019
The work of Chesterton is basically to take the difficult discussions to the surface level and make it somewhat accessible for lay people to understand! I would recommend it to new converts to the Catholic faith, and young Catholics. It isn't bad at all if you don't have the time to read the works of Wolfgang Smith, Fr. Frederick Charles Copleston, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, Fr. Edouard Hugon, Thomas Woods, Olavo de Carvalho etc...
December 16, 2013
Magnificent.
November 10, 2023
*Reseña pendiente*
December 12, 2022
ENGLISH: This is the fifth time I have read this outstanding book, which Chesterton wrote as an answer to H.G. Wells's "Outline of History," and which had a tremendous influence in the conversion to Christianity or Catholicism of other thinkers, such as C.S. Lewis.
In the first part ("On the creature called man") Chesterton reasons that "man is not just an animal." I've also written about this in the most visited post in my blog: Is man just an animal?. The second part ("On the man called Christ") he similarly reasons that "Christ is not just a man."
Let's look at a few outstanding quotes from this book:
From chapter 2: We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts. Chesterton applied this sentence to human paleontology, which in his time was far less advanced than it is now. However, it can also be applied to current cosmology, specially as regards the different multiverse theories (there are at least eight, most of them incompatible with one another).
From chapter 6: Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other words that things are really things--In this Christianity is at one with common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it. True. This is what's happening now.
From chapter 7: These highly civilised people [the Carthaginians] really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. Today we break our infants in pieces inside their mothers. What's worse, I wonder?
ESPAÑOL: Esta es la quinta vez que he leído este libro extraordinario, que Chesterton escribió en respuesta a "Outline of history" de H.G. Wells, y que tuvo una influencia enorme en la conversión al Cristianismo o al Catolicismo de otros pensadores, como C.S. Lewis.
En la primera parte ("Sobre la criatura llamada hombre") Chesterton razona que "el hombre no es sólo un animal". Yo también he escrito sobre esto en el artículo más visitado de mi blog: ¿Es el hombre un animal más?. La segunda parte ("Sobre el hombre llamado Cristo") justifica su afirmación de que "Cristo no es sólo un hombre".
Veamos algunas citas destacadas de este libro:
Del capítulo 2: Tenemos una serie de hipótesis tan apresuradas que bien podrían llamarse fantasías, y en ningún caso pueden ser corregidas por los hechos. Chesterton aplicó esta crítica a la paleontología humana, que en su tiempo estaba mucho menos avanzada que ahora. Sin embargo, también se puede aplicar a la cosmología actual, especialmente en lo que respecta a las teorías del multiverso (hay al menos ocho, la mayoría de ellas incompatibles entre sí).
Del capítulo 6: El cristianismo apela a una verdad sólida fuera de sí misma; a algo que, en ese sentido, es tanto externo como eterno. Declara que las cosas están realmente ahí; en otras palabras, que las cosas son realmente cosas: en esto, el cristianismo va al unísono con el sentido común; pero toda la historia religiosa muestra que el sentido común perece, excepto donde hay cristianismo para conservarlo. Esto es lo que está sucediendo ahora.
Del Capítulo 7: Estas personas altamente civilizadas [los cartagineses] se reunían para invocar la bendición del cielo sobre su imperio, arrojando a un horno enorme a cientos de sus bebés. Hoy rompemos a nuestros bebés en pedazos dentro de sus madres. ¿Qué es peor, me pregunto?
======================================================================
My previous review:
Chesterton's answer to "An outline of history" by H.G.Wells. The fact that almost nobody is reading now Wells's Outline (while his SF novels are very well known), but "The everlasting man" is a classic, indicates that Chesterton was successful. In this -the fourth time I have read the book- I have annotated nine additional quotations. One of them seems to me slightly incorrect: in Part 1 Ch.4, he writes that the Jews "returned to their mountain city by the Zionist policy of the Persian conquerors." I don't think Cyrus's policy can be called Zionism. On the one hand, Zionism is a twentieth century label; on the other, Cyrus gave permission to different exiled people in Babylonia to get back to their original territory and rebuild their temples, not just the Jews. But this is a minor point.
In the first part ("On the creature called man") Chesterton reasons that "man is not just an animal." I've also written about this in the most visited post in my blog: Is man just an animal?. The second part ("On the man called Christ") he similarly reasons that "Christ is not just a man."
Let's look at a few outstanding quotes from this book:
From chapter 2: We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts. Chesterton applied this sentence to human paleontology, which in his time was far less advanced than it is now. However, it can also be applied to current cosmology, specially as regards the different multiverse theories (there are at least eight, most of them incompatible with one another).
From chapter 6: Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other words that things are really things--In this Christianity is at one with common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it. True. This is what's happening now.
From chapter 7: These highly civilised people [the Carthaginians] really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. Today we break our infants in pieces inside their mothers. What's worse, I wonder?
ESPAÑOL: Esta es la quinta vez que he leído este libro extraordinario, que Chesterton escribió en respuesta a "Outline of history" de H.G. Wells, y que tuvo una influencia enorme en la conversión al Cristianismo o al Catolicismo de otros pensadores, como C.S. Lewis.
En la primera parte ("Sobre la criatura llamada hombre") Chesterton razona que "el hombre no es sólo un animal". Yo también he escrito sobre esto en el artículo más visitado de mi blog: ¿Es el hombre un animal más?. La segunda parte ("Sobre el hombre llamado Cristo") justifica su afirmación de que "Cristo no es sólo un hombre".
Veamos algunas citas destacadas de este libro:
Del capítulo 2: Tenemos una serie de hipótesis tan apresuradas que bien podrían llamarse fantasías, y en ningún caso pueden ser corregidas por los hechos. Chesterton aplicó esta crítica a la paleontología humana, que en su tiempo estaba mucho menos avanzada que ahora. Sin embargo, también se puede aplicar a la cosmología actual, especialmente en lo que respecta a las teorías del multiverso (hay al menos ocho, la mayoría de ellas incompatibles entre sí).
Del capítulo 6: El cristianismo apela a una verdad sólida fuera de sí misma; a algo que, en ese sentido, es tanto externo como eterno. Declara que las cosas están realmente ahí; en otras palabras, que las cosas son realmente cosas: en esto, el cristianismo va al unísono con el sentido común; pero toda la historia religiosa muestra que el sentido común perece, excepto donde hay cristianismo para conservarlo. Esto es lo que está sucediendo ahora.
Del Capítulo 7: Estas personas altamente civilizadas [los cartagineses] se reunían para invocar la bendición del cielo sobre su imperio, arrojando a un horno enorme a cientos de sus bebés. Hoy rompemos a nuestros bebés en pedazos dentro de sus madres. ¿Qué es peor, me pregunto?
======================================================================
My previous review:
Chesterton's answer to "An outline of history" by H.G.Wells. The fact that almost nobody is reading now Wells's Outline (while his SF novels are very well known), but "The everlasting man" is a classic, indicates that Chesterton was successful. In this -the fourth time I have read the book- I have annotated nine additional quotations. One of them seems to me slightly incorrect: in Part 1 Ch.4, he writes that the Jews "returned to their mountain city by the Zionist policy of the Persian conquerors." I don't think Cyrus's policy can be called Zionism. On the one hand, Zionism is a twentieth century label; on the other, Cyrus gave permission to different exiled people in Babylonia to get back to their original territory and rebuild their temples, not just the Jews. But this is a minor point.
July 29, 2009
I've now read "The Everlasting Man" for the second time. It has some of the drawbacks other reviewers have noted--racial epithets that don't go down well in the twenty-first century, Eurocentrism (more below), a style that sometimes obscures the main point.
However, these are superficial criticisms. For the most part, it presents an examination of certain logical fallacies about the Christian faith that you sometimes hear today. The science of evolution may have moved on from what it was in Chesterton's day, but the average person's understanding of evolution hasn't.
The main point Chesterton is making, however, is that the materialist interpretation of history, founded ultimately on Marx's analysis of history as being focused on economics, is wrong. Chesterton posits instead a proviential interpretation of history--all events move according to a divine plan. In fact, Chesterton's point is that it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that history is providential. He accomplishes this with a rigorous logic, usually also exposing the flaws in other arguments.
What did I learn from this book? Well, hardly anything new. That's because I read it once before, about fifteen years ago, and the main ideas have all become vague assumptions--now considerably less vague.
Now. On the subject of Eurocentrism. In some ways, this term is as offensive as some other cultural labels that shouldn't be mentioned in polite society. What do we mean by Eurocentric? Where is the centre? In Poland? In Spain? In Greece? In Luxembourg? Like all cultural epithets, the term "eurocentrism" reduces a complex culture to an insultingly simple stereotype.
Chesterton's point is that Christianity is a faith for the whole world, not just for Europe; but it had to begin somewhere, and it found its first flourishing in Europe. That's a hard historical fact to argue against. If you're going to argue that Christianity is the best faith available--and why would be be anything else if you didn't believe that--then you're probably going to sound "Eurocentric." The Incas didn't come up with Christianity. Treating other cultures fairly isn't the same as treating them all the same.
However, these are superficial criticisms. For the most part, it presents an examination of certain logical fallacies about the Christian faith that you sometimes hear today. The science of evolution may have moved on from what it was in Chesterton's day, but the average person's understanding of evolution hasn't.
The main point Chesterton is making, however, is that the materialist interpretation of history, founded ultimately on Marx's analysis of history as being focused on economics, is wrong. Chesterton posits instead a proviential interpretation of history--all events move according to a divine plan. In fact, Chesterton's point is that it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that history is providential. He accomplishes this with a rigorous logic, usually also exposing the flaws in other arguments.
What did I learn from this book? Well, hardly anything new. That's because I read it once before, about fifteen years ago, and the main ideas have all become vague assumptions--now considerably less vague.
Now. On the subject of Eurocentrism. In some ways, this term is as offensive as some other cultural labels that shouldn't be mentioned in polite society. What do we mean by Eurocentric? Where is the centre? In Poland? In Spain? In Greece? In Luxembourg? Like all cultural epithets, the term "eurocentrism" reduces a complex culture to an insultingly simple stereotype.
Chesterton's point is that Christianity is a faith for the whole world, not just for Europe; but it had to begin somewhere, and it found its first flourishing in Europe. That's a hard historical fact to argue against. If you're going to argue that Christianity is the best faith available--and why would be be anything else if you didn't believe that--then you're probably going to sound "Eurocentric." The Incas didn't come up with Christianity. Treating other cultures fairly isn't the same as treating them all the same.
February 25, 2010
I've read this twice now, and I continue to think this is a vastly overrated book. Pieces of it are beautiful and rather brilliant, but only slight pieces. There's the argument about not dismissing ideas simply because they fell out of fashion - were they actually disproved? The answer is, yes, and the book falls short because the author's intelligence was strangled by his Euro-centric, racist, sexist beliefs. He is entirely blind to the crimes of Western Culture, and he seems to have sincerely believed that yes, perhaps the Conquistadors weren't so great, but the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, so it's wonderful that all the indigenous people were wiped out to make way for the West. Rome is turned into the center of all things glorious, and after his passionate attacks on certain academics for basing enormous theories on shaky evidence, it's a great act of hypocrisy to deduce the feelings of every Roman from pretty much nothing.
I'm also pretty offended by any book that talks about how right and true Christianity is and how the whole world was "tired" and bound to come around - without really talking about anything that Jesus actually preached. He's far more fascinated with dogma and propping up creeds than in reading the gospels. Argh. It's frustrating, because some of Chesterton's other writings truly are insightful and full of his much-lauded (un)common-sense. Unfortunately, I think it's a big mistake to tout this book as a brilliant apologetic. I seem to have the strange idea that an apologetic shouldn't mean excusing (and glorifying) the last 500 years of Western exploitation of the people and lands of the planet, and that discussing Christianity shouldn't be an excuse for defending the Old Boys Club. This book is sort of the anti-Tolstoy.
I'm also pretty offended by any book that talks about how right and true Christianity is and how the whole world was "tired" and bound to come around - without really talking about anything that Jesus actually preached. He's far more fascinated with dogma and propping up creeds than in reading the gospels. Argh. It's frustrating, because some of Chesterton's other writings truly are insightful and full of his much-lauded (un)common-sense. Unfortunately, I think it's a big mistake to tout this book as a brilliant apologetic. I seem to have the strange idea that an apologetic shouldn't mean excusing (and glorifying) the last 500 years of Western exploitation of the people and lands of the planet, and that discussing Christianity shouldn't be an excuse for defending the Old Boys Club. This book is sort of the anti-Tolstoy.
July 3, 2025
As it is only by dogma man is freed from the new paganism that would have us “bound to Nothing, being slaves without a lord” (Ballad of the White Horse), I hereby declare my creed:
With strength of ink and lightness of hand, Chesterton penned a masterpiece of the Christian Paradox as an incarnational synthesis of both logical solidity and imaginative subtlety—The Everlasting Man is a butterfly resting on the arches of a cathedral.
With strength of ink and lightness of hand, Chesterton penned a masterpiece of the Christian Paradox as an incarnational synthesis of both logical solidity and imaginative subtlety—The Everlasting Man is a butterfly resting on the arches of a cathedral.
Read
October 21, 2024I started this book a little naively, thinking it presented a world history and even a very early attempt at surveying the entire history of mankind. G.K. Chesterton wrote this in 1925, in response to H.G. Wells's The Outline of History which appeared a few years before. Wells presented a secular version of world history, according to the state of science at the time, and reducing the phenomenon of religion to just one of the sectors of human activity among so many others. That clearly angered Chesterton. In this book he uses world history precisely to show that Christianity was an absolutely new fact that turned everything upside down and offered an unequivocally new view of the universe. In other words, Chesterton's book is absolutely apologetic, a staunch defence of the Christian faith and the church(s) against a secular reading of history. To be clear: that is his right, and in certain respects his vision contains valuable elements.
But in the meantime, science has progressed unstoppably and the accumulated knowledge (in tandem with theorizing) on the history of our universe and on human history has increased phenomenally. It suffices to look at what the sector of Big History, in the many works of David Christian, has built up over the last decades, especially through using astronomy and biology: at this point a fairly coherent narrative of human and cosmological history can be written, on the basis of sound scientific research. Only: this story - interesting as it may be - is almost purely descriptive, it explains how things came to be, although there are still major gaps in certain crucial domains (how did life come about? How exactly did human consciousness arise? etc.). And then there is the inevitable question: what is it all meant for, and why did life and mankind originate? From a philosophical-ethical-religious point of view, these certainly are relevant issues, but of course, many people will maintain that the question of ‘sense’ is absolutely irrelevant, that things are what they are, there is no why, no deeper meaning. I suspect, well, I am sure, that this last remark was also the reason why Chesterton wanted to prove at all costs that the sense-issue was relevant after all, and could even be given a very manifest answer, namely a Christian one.
In my review in my general account (see here) I already indicated that almost a century later Chesterton's view is outdated, both in content and in style. Nevertheless, I believe this book contains some valuable views. To begin with, there is his critique of Wells' scientism: it is not because you can explain how something came about that you have automatically exposed its underlying meaning. By the way, that is also the major criticism on 'Big History' today: it only provides insight into the great lines of the physical, chemical and biological script of cosmological and human evolution (with still some gaps), but nothing more than that.
There also is Chesterton's emphasis that with the appearance of modern man, with his cognitive capacities and his symbolic behaviour, a fundamentally new era has dawned, in which man became the measure of all things. I know, this kind of anthropocentrism these days sounds very obsolete, certainly in the posthumanist era we’ve entered. But—with all the relativization that absolutely is necessary—Chesterton certainly has a point.
Finally, I also found his approach to mythologies, as artistic creations, very valuable; Chesterton sees it as an appropriate expression of the human imagination, and valuable as such. At the same time, he also finds this mythology inferior, because it remains on the surface, and refuses to fathom the bigger picture. Nevertheless, his interpretation provides a meaningful key to properly appreciate mythologies and cosmologies.
So, it is not all negative what I could say about this book, but as indicated earlier, this work - as a World History - is inapt and outdated.
But in the meantime, science has progressed unstoppably and the accumulated knowledge (in tandem with theorizing) on the history of our universe and on human history has increased phenomenally. It suffices to look at what the sector of Big History, in the many works of David Christian, has built up over the last decades, especially through using astronomy and biology: at this point a fairly coherent narrative of human and cosmological history can be written, on the basis of sound scientific research. Only: this story - interesting as it may be - is almost purely descriptive, it explains how things came to be, although there are still major gaps in certain crucial domains (how did life come about? How exactly did human consciousness arise? etc.). And then there is the inevitable question: what is it all meant for, and why did life and mankind originate? From a philosophical-ethical-religious point of view, these certainly are relevant issues, but of course, many people will maintain that the question of ‘sense’ is absolutely irrelevant, that things are what they are, there is no why, no deeper meaning. I suspect, well, I am sure, that this last remark was also the reason why Chesterton wanted to prove at all costs that the sense-issue was relevant after all, and could even be given a very manifest answer, namely a Christian one.
In my review in my general account (see here) I already indicated that almost a century later Chesterton's view is outdated, both in content and in style. Nevertheless, I believe this book contains some valuable views. To begin with, there is his critique of Wells' scientism: it is not because you can explain how something came about that you have automatically exposed its underlying meaning. By the way, that is also the major criticism on 'Big History' today: it only provides insight into the great lines of the physical, chemical and biological script of cosmological and human evolution (with still some gaps), but nothing more than that.
There also is Chesterton's emphasis that with the appearance of modern man, with his cognitive capacities and his symbolic behaviour, a fundamentally new era has dawned, in which man became the measure of all things. I know, this kind of anthropocentrism these days sounds very obsolete, certainly in the posthumanist era we’ve entered. But—with all the relativization that absolutely is necessary—Chesterton certainly has a point.
Finally, I also found his approach to mythologies, as artistic creations, very valuable; Chesterton sees it as an appropriate expression of the human imagination, and valuable as such. At the same time, he also finds this mythology inferior, because it remains on the surface, and refuses to fathom the bigger picture. Nevertheless, his interpretation provides a meaningful key to properly appreciate mythologies and cosmologies.
So, it is not all negative what I could say about this book, but as indicated earlier, this work - as a World History - is inapt and outdated.
September 29, 2021
It's late, so no in depth thoughts (not that I'd be able to do Chesterton justice anyway...if you want in-depth thoughts, read the book) tonight, but just some scattered screaming.
Reading a new Chesterton book is always an adventure, and I had forgotten that. You literally never know what you're going to find on the next page, in the next chapter, whether it's going to make you almost chuckle aloud in Adoration and look up with a look of exultant collaborative mischief at the Host, or strike you right to the heart and make you think differently about history (and your anthropology/archaeology class, and your friends' religion class) from now on. Or something in between. (And yes, both those things did happen.)
The book is divided in half, into humans (and human nature, and primarily human history pre-Christ, and also pre-history because that is a paradox and Chesterton loves those, y'know) and Christ (and also His church). And both halves were phenomenal. As with any Chesterton book, there were bits that stuck out to me In The Extreme, and bits that I'm going to need to go back over, and bits that made my heart sing.
Let me just say that the God/gods/demons/philosophers thing is something I'm going to be coming back to for a long time.
It also compliments Orthodoxy perfectly in so many places. It's beautiful. (I need my own copy, y'all. Preferably one that matches my antique copy of Orthodoxy. I'm a bit tempted to keep the library one, because it Does Match, but I shan't. That would be stealing. But if anyone is looking for a Christmas present for me...hint, hint. XD)
I love Chesterton. Tolkien is my favorite author, but if I was to pick Only One Author To Read Forever, it would be Chesterton. Sorry Tolkien. Love ya. ;)
It is inconceivable that I would give this less than 4.5 stars, first read or no first read. 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 for GR.
Reading a new Chesterton book is always an adventure, and I had forgotten that. You literally never know what you're going to find on the next page, in the next chapter, whether it's going to make you almost chuckle aloud in Adoration and look up with a look of exultant collaborative mischief at the Host, or strike you right to the heart and make you think differently about history (and your anthropology/archaeology class, and your friends' religion class) from now on. Or something in between. (And yes, both those things did happen.)
The book is divided in half, into humans (and human nature, and primarily human history pre-Christ, and also pre-history because that is a paradox and Chesterton loves those, y'know) and Christ (and also His church). And both halves were phenomenal. As with any Chesterton book, there were bits that stuck out to me In The Extreme, and bits that I'm going to need to go back over, and bits that made my heart sing.
Let me just say that the God/gods/demons/philosophers thing is something I'm going to be coming back to for a long time.
It also compliments Orthodoxy perfectly in so many places. It's beautiful. (I need my own copy, y'all. Preferably one that matches my antique copy of Orthodoxy. I'm a bit tempted to keep the library one, because it Does Match, but I shan't. That would be stealing. But if anyone is looking for a Christmas present for me...hint, hint. XD)
I love Chesterton. Tolkien is my favorite author, but if I was to pick Only One Author To Read Forever, it would be Chesterton. Sorry Tolkien. Love ya. ;)
It is inconceivable that I would give this less than 4.5 stars, first read or no first read. 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 for GR.
June 18, 2017
I may have finished this book, but I'm not done with it. Nowhere near. I will be thumbing back through my (many) underlined passages to try and retrace the whole argument Chesterton makes.
Essentially, Chesterton sets out to prove that "man is not an evolution, but a revolution." And that any effort to dismiss Christianity as just one among many belief systems falls short of truly seeing Christianity as the oddity that it was and is still.
Chesterton has a way of seeing the world that draws my attention to details I'd overlooked or dismissed, raises questions I've never thought to ask, and helps me find the humor in things I might have been tempted to take far too seriously. As with all Chesterton, about 1/3 of the book alludes to names, places, or events that are unfamiliar to me. I can usually still trace the argument (since he typically proves each point with several examples), and I find that the other 2/3 of the book are so incredibly brilliant that it is worth ignoring his examples when they get too specific or assume a level of intimate knowledge with, say, Roman history that I do not have.
Essentially, Chesterton sets out to prove that "man is not an evolution, but a revolution." And that any effort to dismiss Christianity as just one among many belief systems falls short of truly seeing Christianity as the oddity that it was and is still.
Chesterton has a way of seeing the world that draws my attention to details I'd overlooked or dismissed, raises questions I've never thought to ask, and helps me find the humor in things I might have been tempted to take far too seriously. As with all Chesterton, about 1/3 of the book alludes to names, places, or events that are unfamiliar to me. I can usually still trace the argument (since he typically proves each point with several examples), and I find that the other 2/3 of the book are so incredibly brilliant that it is worth ignoring his examples when they get too specific or assume a level of intimate knowledge with, say, Roman history that I do not have.
February 10, 2025
"If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die."
When one comes into contact with Chesterton, it is very similar to coming into contact with a mountain. When I speak of Chesterton as massive, however, I make only a passing reference to his physical appearance. He was, of course, a mammoth of a man; at 6'4 and almost 300 pounds, he must have walked, stood, and sat with the same stolidity with which he reasoned, doubted, and believed. Indeed it is said anecdotally of him that when a cab driver recommended he exit the vehicle sideways, he replied: 'Sir, I have no sideways'. But as I was saying, when I speak of Chesterton as larger than life, I make only a passing reference to his corporeal build. He is like a mountain because while his head is in the clouds, the rest of him is so firmly grounded on earth that one suspects it would take more than faith the size of a mustard seed to move him.
I consider it one of the greatest calamities of our time that the evangelical church has handed the baton of apologetics to C.S. Lewis. As Virgil was a mere shade of Homer, so Lewis is a mere shade of Chesterton. There is much that is brilliant in Lewis and much that is not-so-brilliant (for wisdom and folly flow from Lewis as blood and water flowed from our saviour), but the brilliance can always be traced back to the truly great apologists: Chesterton and Pascal. But of all the things Lewis got right, the most important was his insistence that The Everlasting Man was the greatest work of apologetics ever written.
If watching Kurosawa's "Ran (1985)" feels like watching colour cinematography for the first time, then reading The Everlasting Man feels like reading about Jesus for the first time. Nowhere else outside of the gospels is he so mystically sane. Nowhere else does he seem so frightfully unexpected, and nowhere else do we expect him so thoroughly.
It is a great testament to Chesterton's genius that he wrote this book, but it is a poor testament to his message to speak only of his genius. Legere aude.
When one comes into contact with Chesterton, it is very similar to coming into contact with a mountain. When I speak of Chesterton as massive, however, I make only a passing reference to his physical appearance. He was, of course, a mammoth of a man; at 6'4 and almost 300 pounds, he must have walked, stood, and sat with the same stolidity with which he reasoned, doubted, and believed. Indeed it is said anecdotally of him that when a cab driver recommended he exit the vehicle sideways, he replied: 'Sir, I have no sideways'. But as I was saying, when I speak of Chesterton as larger than life, I make only a passing reference to his corporeal build. He is like a mountain because while his head is in the clouds, the rest of him is so firmly grounded on earth that one suspects it would take more than faith the size of a mustard seed to move him.
I consider it one of the greatest calamities of our time that the evangelical church has handed the baton of apologetics to C.S. Lewis. As Virgil was a mere shade of Homer, so Lewis is a mere shade of Chesterton. There is much that is brilliant in Lewis and much that is not-so-brilliant (for wisdom and folly flow from Lewis as blood and water flowed from our saviour), but the brilliance can always be traced back to the truly great apologists: Chesterton and Pascal. But of all the things Lewis got right, the most important was his insistence that The Everlasting Man was the greatest work of apologetics ever written.
If watching Kurosawa's "Ran (1985)" feels like watching colour cinematography for the first time, then reading The Everlasting Man feels like reading about Jesus for the first time. Nowhere else outside of the gospels is he so mystically sane. Nowhere else does he seem so frightfully unexpected, and nowhere else do we expect him so thoroughly.
It is a great testament to Chesterton's genius that he wrote this book, but it is a poor testament to his message to speak only of his genius. Legere aude.
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