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Defensor Fidei
Chesterton is an explicit Christian, although he identifies his religion with reason, and argues for faith as necessary and reasonable. A youthful protestant atheist, he famously made the liquor flow in the Vatican when he publicly converted to Thomistic Catholicism, and after hois death was rewarded with the posthumous title "Defender of the Faith" - a gibe at the claims of post-Henry VIII British Royalty.
Chesterton was a vocal critic of what he called capitalism, which he identified as control of the government by corporate interests. He did not advocate outright appropriation of wealth, but he called himself a distributist, by which he meant that he saw small businesses and small homesteads as an ideal. How to obtain that ideal was always quite vague.
Chesterton was a vocal opponent of what he called egoism and which he identified with petty materialist self-seeking.
But Chesterton was a critic, not a philosopher. He espoused no real system (other than that of the Church, which was then largely liberal) and at that time classical liberalism in England was dead. Chesterton had been an outspoken Liberal, he famously called himself the last of the Liberals. He was on the right side of the Boer War - against it - and on the right side of the Great War - against Germany. His biggest foes were relativism, anarchism, relativism, racism, relativism, ignorance, relativism, dictatorship, skepticism and relativism. His most eloquent arguments were raised to counter those foes. His positive arguments in favor of faith and tradition fall flat. He is a foe of the little mistakes - the narrow fads - the philosophical fallacies of his day which are the same follies as our day. He has to be read with charity and a grain of salt. Rand would have excoriated him, for all the obvious flaws. If reading Rand is like scaling a sky scraper built among huts then reading him is like walking out of a pig sty and into a cathedral.
(Why do these men have such guilty expressions?)
(Edited by Ted Keer on 7/29, 3:39pm)
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We deny the snobbish assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the most dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral people, and my heart goes out to them.
