The Everlasting Man

For Chesterton, Christianity was a paradox: a complete novelty that proclaimed timeless and age-old truths. In the contemporary world, the novelty has been lost. Chesterton hopes to present the story anew, assuming that hearing it with fresh ears would necessitate conversion: “a really impartial reading of that kind would lead, if not immediately to belief, at least to a bewilderment of which there is really no solution except in belief” (367). Chesterton stresses that most people don’t know the real Jesus, but instead imagine the caricature of him crafted by Church dogma. In fact, the Christ of the Gospels is shocking and bewildering.

Nothing about the Gospels is as we should expect them to be: no stories of “divine precocity” (374) in the infant Jesus, no information concerning the first three decades of his life, and tales of exorcisms and rebukes and wrath. Popular imagination seems wholly captured by a meek and mild Jesus barely exists in the Gospels. Instead, “the Christ of the Gospel might actually seem more strange and terrible than the Christ of the Church” (381). The Christ of the Gospels was a man  whose ideal has never been an acceptable platitude: “it is just as easy to defend it now as it was to defend it then. It is an ideal altogether outside time; difficult at any period” (387-88).

Reiterating the general aim of the text, the author asserts that “the purpose of this book is to point out that something unique has been swamped in cheap generalisations” (393). In other words, the Christian claim is so out of the ordinary and idiosyncratic that it defies explanation: “[e]ven if Christianity was one vast universal blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation” (400). The figure of Christ is unlikely and paradoxical:

No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster […] He was exactly what the man with a delusion never is; he was wise; he was a good judge. What he said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often unexpectedly moderate (402-03).

The only explanation for this singularity is that the Gospels recorded the life of a real man; had they invented the narrative, they would not have structured it the way it appears.

What is more, “the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom” (411). The whole of his life streaked across the stage of history like a lightning bolt, barreling with ferocity towards death at the hands of the Romans, only to end his life as it began, in a cave, for “in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human” (423).