The Universe and Mr Chesterton

The Bible’s opening words “In the beginning”—later echoed in St. John’s Gospel—suggest an affinity between the Christian project of saving the world and the philosophical project of understanding it. Philosophy too ponders the beginnings, the principles of our knowledge and our universe. Although G K Chesterton was hardly a professional philosopher, he did turn a particularly alert mind to those beginnings—not with treatises on metaphysics or ethics, but with the example of a life of writing that gave eloquent witness to the theoretical and moral principles of Western thought at its best. That witness not only invites us to take a more objective look at the claims of Christianity, but also to welcome the lessons of wisdom implicit in sense experience. If this stance put Chesterton at odds with much of modern philosophy, it was only because it put him face to face with a world many philosophers could no longer see, but only scrutinise. In the present book, Chesterton’s way of looking at the universe generates as much existential impact as a religious conversion. And conversions—whether religious or philosophical—redirect our easily distracted mind to a universe that is naturally evident only by being supernaturally significant.

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