Knowledge of Ignorance in The Everlasting Man

By Jonathan Wanner

“The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” —G.K. Chesterton

I have long read Chesterton’s apologetic works with a sort of agitated veneration. As an icon of the Catholic Literary Revival (1845-1961), he is hailed as the “prince of paradox”:¹ even his arch-nemesis (or as he puts it, “friendly enemy”) George Bernard Shaw confessed that “He was a man of colossal genius.”² Yet, the little English professor inside my skull complains he breaks all the Writing 101 rules: he is neither clear nor concise, but rambles prettily and swerves wherever his fancy pleases—sometimes off the road entirely. Often, he speaks in absolutes, granting him a commanding and decisive tone; at the same time, his ironic style—the constant parade of paradoxes, reversals, and chiasms—blurs the boundaries between words. In short, Chesterton is master of being definitive and ambiguous at the same time. The preface of The Everlasting Man is a prime example. It begins,

“There are two ways of getting home …”³ So far so good. Sounds plain and resolute. That is, until the punchline: “… and one of them is to stay there.”

And now your brain is a bowl of mashed potatoes. In the face of such a blatant contradiction, who wouldn’t toss their sanity into the Kitchen Aid? Next comes the gravy:

“The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.”

The sentence sounds sensible. Yet, it doesn’t explain how “staying home” is a way of “getting home.” Was the opener a red herring? A faux punchline to hook the audience? It isn’t until five cocktail parties later that you realize “getting home” is a poetic way of saying “understanding home.”

As you can see, Chesterton draws a fine line between confusion and wonder. One might describe his style as an “ordered chaos.” Of course, the most endearing part of reading Chesterton is that he makes your brain do a handstand. He has a way of turning the pockets of every phrase inside out, and if you read him long enough, you begin to realize that you disliked Chesterton because there was too much to like about him. For this reason, every Chesterton critic is a fanatic in disguise.

To be honest, there are two reasons why every literate soul should read Chesterton: 1) 50% of the time, you have no idea what he’s talking about, and 2) if you’re an educated Catholic, he almost always concludes with an idea you already know. To put it more plainly, he’s the kind of writer whose greatest vices are actually virtues. You see, ignorance—and even confusion—becomes a virtue when it inspires a reader to move from error to knowledge. All too often we think we know when, in fact, we don’t know that we don’t know. It is the difference between ignorance and error, and as every sage realizes, it is much better to know you don’t know than to think you know when you don’t. A lapsed Catholic with the firm convictions of an atheist is always worse off than a child who has never heard the name of Christ. Even for a rational giant—an Aquinas—steeped in philosophy and Revelation, ignorance outpaces knowledge. There is a reason the “Angelic Doctor” famously declared, “All that I have written seems like straw”; he knew that man’s nature allots him more ignorance than understanding. As much as we pretend to have “gaps of knowledge,” as if the human mind is a continent with a few craters in it, the reality is our little islands of knowledge dot a vaster ocean of ignorance. Or, if you prefer, our knowledge is not simply gapped like Swiss cheese: if we zoom out, we learn that there are more holes around the Swiss cheese than there are inside it. This is not to say that ignorance is bliss. Not knowing should agitate us: it nags us to seek knowledge.

Conveniently, there is a word that compacts this idea into a few microcosmic syllables: wonder. Wonder, in its classical sense, is “the passion that arises from consciousness of ignorance.”⁴ Emerging from an encounter with the extraordinary, the strange, the baffling, it seizes the soul and disturbs it with the realization of “I do not know.” As Josef Pieper says, “Wonder acts upon a man like a shock, he is ‘moved’ and ‘shakend’ and in the dislocation that succeeds all that he had taken for granted as being natural or self-evident loses its compact solidity and obviousness; he is literally dislocated and no longer knows where he is.”⁵ It is Gollum’s agitation of not knowing the answer to Bilbo’s riddle; it is the anxiety of not understanding the seemingly meaningful and yet elusive symbols of Eliot’s “Wasteland”; it is the perplexity of reading that time-old paradox “love is a pleasing pain” for the first time. What makes this disturbance unexpected is the fact that it is rooted in the ordinary: whatever is in Bilbo’s pocket, it is surely something simple and common to a traveler; whatever Eliot’s poem signifies, it is about fire, a sailor, London; whatever the paradox means, pleasure and pain are part of everyone’s daily toil. This is where the wisdom of life lies veiled: in common places. In the words of Pieper, “the deeper aspects of reality are apprehended in the ordinary … it is in the things we come across in the experience of everyday life that the unusual emerges, and we no longer take them for granted.”⁶

To the average Joe and Jane of today, however, this two-syllable word is, if anything, cheap in meaning: in a time when dish soap, Wonderbread, Taylor Swift, and the latest iPhone are “wonderful,” literary critics tend to dismiss wonder as mere sentiment. Yet, its significance cannot be overstated. As the beginning of wisdom, it yokes poetry to philosophy; as the cattle prod of the intuition, it awakens the heart to the joyful disturbance of the passions. It extends beyond mere sentimentality and awakens readers to the awful and sublime mystery of the real. I say awful because when we arrive at any point where knowledge is inaccessible—for who can comprehend God’s allness or evil’s nothingness?—then we must have enough courage to allow reality’s unknowability to terrify us. Experiencing our ignorance’s enormity, in an odd way, gives us an experience of truth’s immensity: truth, after all, is infinitely vaster than our infinite souls. The wiser man knows that the more you know, the more you know what you don’t know. This is, in fact, Chesterton’s enchantment—he teaches knowledge by forcing the reader into a state of ignorance. By the riddling language of irony, he turns confusion into an art and fashions stale ideas in strange, new garments.

Which brings us to his tour de force: “The Everlasting Man.” If I had to choose, I’d say my favorite chapter is the one that isn’t one: the preface. It is about a book he never wrote—one that tells of a farm boy who galivants far from home in search of a giant’s grave only to find, upon his return, that it was under his kitchen garden the whole time.⁷ The moral: squint hardest at what is right in front of your eyes. If you do, you may just find that strangeness is tucked under the familiar, that the extraordinary is entombed within the ordinary. You might just wonder.

Most of all, the book is a bullhorn of wonder for lapsed Christians. More than anyone else, these souls need a full dose of ignorance because their familiarity with Christianity fools them into believing their errors are truths. They are the kind of people who need to know that they don’t know that they don’t know. The surprising truth is that apostates would be much better off if they knew nothing whatsoever about Christianity. Then, at least, ignorance might be a gateway to wonder:

“It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika.”⁸

Oddly enough, the problem with lapsed Christians is that they are so familiar with Christianity that they don’t understand what it is. This is why “while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.”⁹

Of course, even devout Catholics have their errors and routinely need to be jolted into an awareness of their ignorance. If Aquinas’ greater writings were straw, how much cheaper are the thoughts of pious Joes? The ones who presume to know the Catechism are rarely the ones who live by it, and even the devil can quote canon law. We must never be too faithful to wonder, just as we must never believe ourselves too wonderful to need faith. Even when you are inside Christendom, you need strange eyes to see how often you live as one outside it.

By now I have sufficiently failed to explain what The Everlasting Man is about with the higher hope that you may know what the book is for. Do not thumb its pages expecting to comprehend Chesterton’s riddles at the first bat of your eyelashes. Here is a book for unhurried rumination, for leisure. Second, convince yourself that this book—as challenging as it is—is charged with mystery. You will encounter old errors and older truths, but Chesterton labels them with new and peculiar names to remind us that the strangest realities are the familiar ones. Look where you have always been and you might see how scarecrows hang on crosses, how crosiers hang off fiddles, how even God may live in your stomach.

Flannery O’Connor once said, “The truth will make you odd.” In Chesterton, this notion comes full circle: He makes the truth odd so that, made familiar with falsehood, we might become as strange as we always were.

Endnotes:

¹ J.D. Douglas, “G.K. Chesterton, the Eccentric Prince of Paradox,” Christianity Today, May 24, 1974.

² “Books: Orthodoxologist,” Time, October 11th, 1943.

³ G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), 3.

⁴ Dennis Quinn, Iris Exiled: a Synoptic History of Wonder (University Press of America, 2002), 11.

⁵ Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (Ignatius Press, 2009), 114.

⁶ Ibid., 111.

⁷ G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), 3.

⁸ Ibid., 6.

⁹ Ibid., 5.