The Man Who Was Thursday: Chesterton's Duel with the Fin de Siècle

In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of State, the reasonable processes of law—all these like sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was the centre of the universe; it was round him that the stars swung. All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, "I suppose I am very heretical," and looks round for applause. The word "heresy" not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox.

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Chapter x of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1907) is titled "The Duel." It features the hero, Gabriel Syme, in exhausting swordplay with the impossibly unharmed Marquis de Saint Eustache—a literal duel that reflects the many figurative ones that occur throughout the novel. Chesterton had many quarrels with his time (only such a man could title one of his books What's Wrong with the World) and enjoyed dueling over any issue that came to light in the pages of the Daily News or from the pens of friendly adversaries such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. And while the issues that Chesterton debated were numerous and filled the pages of The Illustrated London News for thirty years, much of his work can be read as an argument for the importance of what C. S. Lewis would, almost forty years after the publication of Thursday, call "the Tao": "the sole source of all value judgments" ¹ that informs all major world religions—"the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are really false." ² Chesterton, with uncharacteristic brevity, used the label "general theories" ³ for this same idea, resisting, "quite consciously, the splitting apart of reason and emotion, mind and body, spirit and matter, which had occurred unconsciously in so many of his contemporaries." ⁴

To Chesterton, what proved the truth of general theories was their very generality, a shared belief that what are commonly called "Judeo-Christian ethics" are "the best root of energy and ethics," ⁵ and the belief that not all questions of value are relative or solely functions of time and space. In Orthodoxy, published a year after Thursday, Chesterton characterizes his era—which he feared was moving toward increasingly relativistic values—with the remark, "A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed." ⁶ Chesterton's great and extended duel against what he viewed as (at best) a wooden headed and (at worst) a pernicious moral entropy was fought in the pages of his novels, short stories, verse, essays, and apologia; his greatest foes were not figures such as Shaw and Wells, whose values ran counter to Chesterton's own, but those who denied the importance of such intellectual contests in the first place.

Chesterton spent...