34 pages • 1 hour read
G. K. ChestertonThe Everlasting Man
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1925A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 4-6 and ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “On the Man Called Christ”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “The Witness of the Heretics”
Chesterton finds important early Christian imagery of “the key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty” (425-26). As Christianity and the Catholic Church began to take shape and to spread, they overtook the great cosmopolitan cultures where they were “felt to be something new and strange” (430). Christianity’s intrinsic universality was all things to all people, “Roman and Greek and Jewish and African and Asiatic” (436), and it brought with it the twin poles of joy and asceticism.
The Christian philosophy was a middle ground between the fulfillment of all wishes and asceticism for asceticism’s sake—these were the paths that Christianity’s enemies traveled. Early Church heresies were extremes that “in one form or another regarded the creation of the world as the work of an evil spirit” (445). The Church had to battle pessimism and despair, and “the primitive Catholics were especially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy” (447). If Christianity had ever been anything like its critics or its uninformed evaluators asserted, it should have been swept up and lost to history quite some time ago.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “The Escape from Paganism”
Christian truth united the religious and the philosophical, the realm of faith and the realm of reason: “in the ancient world religion was one thing and philosophy quite another” (464), which now they could be synthesized in a single pursuit of truth. Along with the ability to unite faith and reason came the capacity for true joy, as opposed to “the one thing common to mythology and philosophy was that both were really sad” (480), precluding true happiness.
The key aspect of Christian doctrine that evokes this joy is that the transcendent and distant God that had long evaded humanity was no longer a cold and remote presence, but had entered into the flow of history. Humanity felt accompanied in the universe, no longer alone and lonely: “Nothing short of the extreme and strong and startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will give that particular effect that can truly stir the popular sense like a trumpet; the idea of the king himself serving in the ranks like a common soldier” (484). In some instances, this startling truth proves to be too much for the common critic: “To them it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy” (486). Christianity, at its heart, affirms that humanity is now capable of divine greatness.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “The Five Deaths of the Faith”
The appearance of Christianity “amid heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a supernatural thing” (499); its supernatural character makes it both ancient and evergreen, “always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion” (500). Every time the world judges the Church to be old, out of step, and on the brink of collapse, it is refashioned and made fresh: “At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died” (511).
Conclusion Summary: “The Summary of This Book”
Chesterton’s primary criticism of H. G. Wells is that he got the facts of historical narrative right, but the overall picture wrong: “it is splendid as a store-house or treasury of history; it is a fascinating disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of history; but it is quite false as an outline of history” (523) because it compromised the importance of humanity. The fact that we recognize that we share much in common with the rest of the created universe is a sign that we are unique creatures; only humans could recognize that they are thus self-aware. Part and parcel of this recognition is the greater recognition that there is a definite plan to history—“that the world has such a final purpose and therefore such a first cause” (528-29). The incarnation is an axis for this designed and purposeful world, proclaiming “the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person” (533).
Part 2, Chapters 4-6 and Conclusion Analysis
The Church had to battle various heresies, which Chesterton characterizes as extremes, in its rise to universality. As the Church overtook the various cultures and civilizations in which it began to flourish—Chesterton lists Jewish, Greek, African, European, and Asian societies as ones thus dominated—it had to suppress ideologies to which it was opposed, and which could have seemed superficially similar to the uninformed. One such extreme was hyper-asceticism: The Church proclaimed the goodness of asceticism, but it had to preach against various sects that taught the intrinsic evil of the material world. Another set of extremes were absolute abstinence or boundless hedonism: The Church had to praise virginity and procreation simultaneously, as some heretical groups either denigrated sexuality as a participation in the material evil of the world or proclaimed that sexuality was no different than any other act and was completely inconsequential.
Chesterton again reasserts that as the point of contact between heaven and earth, the Church had to defend reason in addition to religious belief. The belief in a God who created the world in a logical and rational manner created a situation in which faith and reason could harmonize. This synthesis in the human mind between the intellect seeking truth and the will seeking someone to love and desire finds its source in the person of Jesus Christ, the one in whom the transcendent cause of existence comes to walk side by side with humanity. The ancient myths that sought to plumb the depths of the human experience found their answer in the Incarnation, where the romance between God and humanity is consummated.
To Chesterton, the Christian Church is a supernatural institution that remains ageless despite the vicissitudes of history. Whenever the Church dies a kind of death by failing to capture the minds and hearts of those to whom it preaches, it rises from the ashes and finds a new foothold in a different culture. This makes the Christian Church (and the acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as the lord of history) the only way to accurately outline how history has actually unfolded on its way to the final goal.
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