Dr. Duncan Reyburn is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria, where he has taught since 2007. In his teaching, his focus is interpretive experience and creative thinking; in his research, this same hermeneutical focus is on the work of René Girard, Marshall McLuhan, and G. K. Chesterton. His broader scholarly interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and visual culture. Before shifting fully into academia, he worked as an animator, comic artist, designer, design consultant, and television commercial director. He is the author of Seeing Things as They Are: G. K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning (2016) and The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton (2025). He also tweets, and you can read more from him on Substack.
What does G. K. Chesterton have to offer us on the topic of mental health? Quite a lot, it turns out. In this conversation, Chesterton scholar Duncan Reyburn explores how wonder, gratitude, humility, and paradox shape a genuinely healthy human life. Moving beyond a narrow diagnostic view of mental health, Reyburn draws on Chesterton’s insights to show how modern reductionism diminishes the soul—and how joy, imagination, and a rightly ordered sense of proportion can restore it. Along the way, the discussion touches on pride and humility, criticism and love, Christmas and incarnation, and the deep connection between spiritual formation and psychological flourishing in a distracted age.
Names mentioned:
G. K. Chesterton, Iain McGilchrist, Northrop Frye, Brother Lawrence, George MacDonald, St. Thomas Aquinas, William Desmond, Aidan Nichols, Geroge Bernard Shaw, Joseph Pearce, Dale Ahlquist, Gilbert Magazine, David Deavel, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis.
Books:
The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (by Iain McGilchrist)
The Educated Imagination (by Northrop Frye)
Practicing the Presence of God (by Brother Lawrence)
Unspoken Sermons (by George MacDonald)
Wisdom and Innocence (by Joseph Pearce)
The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton (by Duncan Reyburn)
Seeing Things as They are: G.K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning (by Duncan Reyburn)
Memento (film reference)
G. K. Chesterton’s works:
The Man Who Was Thursday
Orthodoxy
The Everlasting Man
The Defendant
Tremendous Trifles
Heretics
“The Symbolism of Syntax” (essay)
“If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach” (essay)
Radix: Duncan, thank you so very much for taking the time to be with us. You are a vast treasure trove of Chestertonian wisdom and of the spirit he embodied. I haven’t yet read your latest book, I’ve just begun it, but your first book, Seeing Things as They Are: G. K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning was profoundly grand, and I highly recommend it to anyone.
In this particular issue of Radix, we’re focusing on mental health broadly defined. I think it’s safe to say that our world has become much more adept at labeling things—depression, trauma, burnout, anxiety, and so on. We name these realities more easily than ever, and yet in many ways we also seem increasingly plagued by them, too. When I thought about you and your knowledge of Chesterton, alongside what thoughts you might have about a Chestertonian view of mental health I was curious. As an aside, but related, as a lover of Chesterton myself, I often think of Iain McGilchrist and his book The Matter with Things, where he speaks about how the way we attend to the world determines what we see. How we choose to see shapes the world we inhabit. Anyway, the Chestertonian vision, it seems to me, is rooted in seeing with eyes of gratitude—the sense that the world did not have to be here at all. The importance of wonder. The importance of humility. Chesterton holds all of these together so beautifully. So I wondered how we might bring Dr. Reyburn’s expertise on Chesterton into this larger conversation.
Maybe, to begin, would you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Duncan Reyburn: Chesterton once suggested that we should not enjoy ourselves, but enjoy everything else.[1] Talking about Chesterton is easy for me; talking about myself is a little less so.
Radix: [Laughter]
DR: I’m a family man first and foremost. My life world is my wife and my two daughters. But I also happen to be an academic. I work at the University of Pretoria, where my main teaching area is creative thinking. Fortunately, I’m given a great deal of academic freedom. Along my scholarly journey, I discovered this wonderful writer named G. K. Chesterton, among others, and he became one of my main areas of focus. Most of my research falls under philosophical theology. I also write on Substack for a small audience, and occasionally I get to speak with lovely interviewers.
Radix: And you also have a background in film animation, is that right?
DR: My undergraduate degree was in what is called information design here—a generalist program in design, illustration, and animation. From there I went into animation professionally. I directed some television commercials, worked on branding campaigns, and did various other design-related projects. But my primary work was animating. Eventually I decided to give that up. Interestingly enough, that’s also where Chesterton began—in the visual arts. His first degree was in fine arts at the Slade in London, which he famously disliked and left as soon as he could. He became, humorously enough, a university dropout, which is quite remarkable given how intelligent he was.
One of the ways I discovered Chesterton was during my first job as an animator. I found the days very dull. Animation work can be extremely tedious, and it was far more tedious for me than I expected. To get my day started on a good note, I would read a Chesterton essay in the morning before going to work. That kept me sane. I would carry that essay in the back of my mind while I worked.
Radix: Right—getting a little sanity and common sense to start the day off.
DR: Exactly. It’s surprising, really. I love teaching creative thinking and coming up with creative ideas, but the actual animation job itself was not what I imagined it would be. It wasn’t very creative for me. I’ve found the teaching side of things much more nourishing for the creative spirit.
Radix: Thank you for sharing some of that. To start with something quite large: wonder was profoundly important for Chesterton. And as we go along, I’ll try to frame our conversation in terms of mental health; though I might add a small disclaimer. When people speak about mental health, they often think only of what’s wrong, the negative dimensions, but not always of the positive.
If we think of it maybe like tending a garden: we certainly have to care for the weeds—but we also have to care for the flowers, the soil, the whole environment that allows things to grow and flourish. Human flourishing involves much more than simply labeling what’s broken. So, to the question: how did Chesterton value wonder? Why was it so important to him?
DR: One of the things that truly concerned Chesterton was how the modern world had become fixated on making things small. In a strange way, modernity almost makes the human being into a giant. And to a giant, everything looks small and foreshortened. Chesterton was deeply troubled by this because he felt it ultimately diminished the human experience.
Modernity, broadly speaking, has focused on getting gadgetry right—measuring the world, connecting the world through technologies, emphasizing scientific mastery, particularly after the Industrial Revolution. Chesterton believed this had the unintended consequence of diminishing wonder, of weakening our appreciation for the world.
His response to this reductionist tendency was an attempt to recover the fullness of human experience. And I think that’s deeply relevant for mental health. As you said, mental health is about tending the whole garden. We do need to notice the weeds, but we also need to notice what allows everything to flourish. And we ourselves are standing in that garden trying to learn how to care for it.
A helpful definition of mental health might be something like: learning how to cope with what life presents us in a way that moves us toward wholeness and flourishing, rather than becoming trapped in endless measurement and categorization. This is where some of the danger of a purely diagnostic view of mental health can come in. Diagnoses involve categories and labels—things we can measure. And sometimes people begin to feel they must submit themselves to the diagnosis, rather than to the highest calling placed on their lives.
So there is a need to step outside the modern frame and ask, what does it truly mean to be fully human? Chesterton even said of his own time—though it’s no less true of ours—that human dignity is something we must defend with all our might, because it is under threat. One of the ways it is under threat is through modern ways of thinking about the mind that reduce it to the brain, or to diagnoses alone. When we think that way, we forget that there is a larger world to participate in. This is really where wonder becomes essential. Chesterton invites us into a rich, robust experience of being in the world.
He famously wrote that the world will never lack wonders, but only a lack of wonder. Wonders are not in short supply—wonder is.[2] And we must be willing to take note of what is already there.
Radix: I’m curious about something related to that. Chesterton spoke often about the Book of Job as one of his favorite books. I think he once suggested—though he was given to hyperbole—that in all the philosophy in the world, the Book of Job stood above the rest.[3] Part of what Job wrestles with is the reality that we live in a broken world where suffering is real, and yet we are still called to be grateful for the sheer fact that the world exists at all.
That posture of gratitude seems closely related to wonder. Northrop Frye wrote The Educated Imagination, and I’ve often wondered whether there are ways to cultivate or “educate” wonder in us—so that we might become more open-hearted, more aligned with Chesterton’s sense that the world is dangerous, yes—but also profoundly good.
DR: I think the Book of Job really does serve as a paradigm for Chesterton. His novel The Man Who Was Thursday is, in many ways, a retelling of Job. Chesterton never avoided the real struggles people face. There are different kinds of perplexity in life—some that inspire and entice us, and others that threaten and overwhelm us. When someone faces genuine suffering, as Job did, the questions often seem to have no answers. That can be deeply destabilizing.
Part of what Chesterton recommends in response to this—what he called modern “gigantism”—is learning to make ourselves small. He even suggested that we should train our imaginations to shrink ourselves. Interestingly, this is not about distorting reality, but about restoring proper proportion. We are, in fact, very small. It is a big world after all, not a small one. When we rediscover that, everything becomes more of an adventure. If, for example, you try to open a drawer to get your notes and it’s stuck, you are no longer engaged in a frustrating inconvenience—you are engaged in an epic battle against your desk.
Radix: [Laughter]
DR: Using the imagination to make ourselves small is, I would say, almost a spiritual discipline. It rewires the mind toward wonder. Another practice is simply to go out and intentionally look for what inspires, elevates, and edifies us. We see this in art, in music, in aesthetic experiences, and certainly in nature.
I once saw Duchamp’s Fountain—the famous urinal sculpture—at the Tate Modern in London. Duchamp originally created it as a joke, and I appreciate the humor behind it. But when you stand before it in a gallery, it doesn’t truly elevate the human spirit. By contrast, so many forms of art and beauty genuinely draw us upward. And here is the paradox: we feel elevated, yet at the same time we feel small. We are made to be more than ourselves precisely as we become less. Chesterton would urge us to pay attention to that paradox.
To cultivate wonder, then, we must train ourselves to look for what is wonderful—and to allow ourselves to wonder. But this requires slowness. It requires time. One of the great casualties of modern life is our capacity to slow down, to be quiet, to give sustained attention. Chesterton himself was endlessly busy and astonishingly productive. His mind moved at a ferocious pace. Yet he was deeply attentive to the world. He never lingered only on the surface of things. He was always asking about their deeper substance and meaning. If I were to suggest a rough guide to wonder, I would begin with those practices. Begin with them—but certainly not end with them.
Radix: It’s interesting that in the last 30 years, or so, we see all of this interest in the “slow” movement: slow food, slow living, slow child-rearing. “Mindfulness” is now everywhere in the secular conversation. And I sometimes think, well, certain parts of the Church, at least, have been cultivating contemplative life for centuries—you’re just finally catching up.
DR: Very true. And in a sense, I think that’s very true of what Chesterton valued. He prayed through his life. He even has a beautiful quote about it: “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” If we think about it, that actually carries the same spirit as Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God: that we are to fully live with awareness of God in everything.
That kind of life is nearly impossible if we’re living frantically—if life becomes a frenzy of tasks and endless lists. And I do understand that many of these demands are no longer fully chosen. It often feels as though this pace is simply how life is now. Chesterton reminds us that it doesn’t actually have to be that way. We can be busy without being over-busy—active without being consumed by tasks.
One of the gifts of writing, which Chesterton practiced constantly, is that it forces you to slow down. You attend carefully to each sentence. You reflect on what you’re trying to communicate. And you discover, again and again, that what you intend to say is always larger than what you can articulate. He was deeply aware that meaning always exceeds what we put on the page. There is always a surplus. That’s why I often use the word invitational. The written word is a beginning, not an end. There is always more to discover—more meaning, more being—beyond our articulations. It really is a treasure trove.
Radix: And in that sense, having a posture of receptivity, one that resists rigid certainty, makes us more porous to the things that can enter our lives that are good and beautiful and true.
DR: Yes. And this connects again to McGilchrist, who observes so beautifully that attention works in two directions. As we attend to things, those things also call forth a particular kind of attending from us. We do not pay the same sort of attention to a chair as we do to an apple, or a computer, or the weather, or a corpse. Each thing draws us into a different posture of attention and meaning. Chesterton is inviting us into this receptive posture toward the world—one in which we allow ourselves to be addressed by the goodness of being itself.
Radix: Along with that, I think gratitude naturally follows. And I’ve often wondered whether gratitude might be described as a kind of psychological reorientation. I don’t know if that’s exactly right, but it sounded good when I first typed it as a question.
DR: I think you’re quite right. Chesterton himself said that thanks are the highest form of thought.[4] That’s a profound claim—that gratitude trains us to attune ourselves to what is good, true, and beautiful in the world.
If we ask where to begin in enriching our perspective, gratitude may actually come first, even before wonder. Genuine thankfulness. It may begin as a kind of rote habit for many people. In happiness psychology, for example, people are often encouraged to list what they’re grateful for each day. That practice can become rushed or mechanical. But what really matters is learning to attend properly—deeply, slowly, and simply—to the gifts before us. To notice not just that things exist, but what they give.
In phenomenology there is a beautiful idea that everything is given to perception—that everything has the potential to be a gift to consciousness. Gratitude, then, is like the glove that allows us to catch the gift as it comes toward us. Without that posture of receptivity, the gift often simply passes us by.
Radix: I was once giving a presentation on George MacDonald and Chesterton on the nature of criticism. I love old quotes, and I was digging through a very old book of manners when I came across one that said something like: criticism has gone wrong when it only points out what is faulty instead of revealing what is right.
And I remember thinking, that is so Chestertonian. He once said that in literary criticism we often behave like judges hunting for crimes in literature instead of searching for what is good.[5] That connects to the idea of becoming an “ocular athlete”—training the eye to see what is good.
Going further, for Chesterton the true critic will have an actual appreciation for the thing he or she is criticizing. The lover and the friend can criticize because they are safe; the enemy cannot, because they aren’t really seeing at all.[6] And that suggests that a gracious posture toward life begins with the assumption that there is goodness to be found.
Sorry—that turned into a bit of a rant.
DR: No, I love that. I was immediately reminded of George MacDonald’s reflection in his Unspoken Sermons on God as a consuming fire—that love cannot tolerate what is unlovely in the beloved. That refusal of what diminishes the beloved actually flows from love; it is not opposed to it. That is very much how Chesterton approached criticism. I write about this in my first book: he always tried to step into the shoes of the author he was reading. He wanted to understand what the author was trying to say, what their meaning truly was.
He actually began his career as a writer of book reviews, and he could certainly be sharp in his judgments. But it is a remarkable testament to his character that he remained genuine friends with many of the very people he criticized. In Heretics, for example, he is often teasing his friends. Criticism, for him, could take the form of affectionate teasing—holding someone to their best because you believe they are capable of better. And you do so with the expectation that they, in turn, will hold you to your best.
Again, this connects directly to mental health. In a healthy community of appreciation, we lift one another toward our highest good rather than dragging one another downward. Harsh, contemptuous critique lacks humility. Chesterton understood that every thinker and every writer is on a journey, working within the limits of their time and their perspective.
Because he was so attuned to what McLuhan later called the “formal cause,” he was deeply attentive to the environments that shape thought. He could see how people had constrained their thinking by attending to the wrong things. In many ways, he saw this as one of the great forms of modern madness.
Radix: What you said about holding one another accountable while believing in one another really struck me. It seems to require a kind of hope—that the other person truly is trying to do their very best. With Chesterton, the barbs could be sharp, but the goodness was always there.
I’m always struck by the fact that when Chesterton died, Shaw wrote to his wife Frances and offered financial help. Because while they disagreed, Chesterton and Shaw were friends. It’s been said by many biographers that Chesterton didn’t really have enemies. People liked him because he was willing to engage, willing to converse. He seemed to assume the best—or at least refuse to assume the worst.
DR: Right. I think that’s because he began with the conviction, drawn from Aquinas, that being as such is good. You touched on it earlier: existence itself is already a miracle. I recall reading in one of the biographies that Chesterton would sometimes enter a room and seem almost surprised that he was there.
There are so many stories of him getting lost and then sending a telegram to his wife asking where he was supposed to be—only for her to reply, “Home.” In a paradoxical way, he could lose track of where he was meant to be because he was so fully caught up in where he actually was. He had a romantic temperament, though he was also deeply intellectual.
From a personality perspective he would likely be classified as an INTP on the Myers-Briggs scale: someone predisposed to lose track of the immediate world, but precisely because of that, able to perceive the world as strange and miraculous. He lived in a continual state of surprise. And surprise is the beginning of wonder. Wonder, in turn, is the beginning of philosophy—the love of wisdom. And that might well be one of the truest definitions of mental health.
Radix: Speaking of paradox, it seems that people today seem to have a very difficult time living with paradox. And yet paradox is everywhere. Interestingly, we do have respected thinkers from both the conservative and the liberal sides telling us that we actually need both perspectives to inhabit the world well. But to live inside that tension is hard. Each side often resists seeing the goodness present in the other—yet the paradox remains that both carry something true.
DR: True.
Radix: And paradox, when it runs amok or isn’t centered properly, can be confusing—but I think in our modern world the bigger problem is our inability to live with paradox at all. Do you have anything more to say about that?
DR: This is one of the places where Chesterton consistently pushes back against the modern reductionist paradigm. Modern thinking often assumes there must be one answer, one correct way of looking at things. If you’re solving a math equation, of course you want the single right answer. If you’re measuring something, you arrive at one clear value. That is entirely appropriate to those disciplines, which are aimed at functional precision. The trouble comes when that mindset is applied to all of reality. If the modern world tends to reduce everything to a single, univocal answer, paradox invites us to pay attention to reality as we actually experience it—which is to say, full of many things happening at once.
As I’ve grown older, this has become very clear to me. When I was younger and wished someone a happy birthday, I could easily say, “I hope you have a good year, or, I hope the year ahead is full of wonder and adventure,” and mean it sincerely. I still hope that for people. But now I’m acutely aware that any year is a mixed bag. Beautiful and terrible things are always intertwined. Life is majestic and difficult, glorious and painful. If we attend honestly to what it means to be human—to be embodied—then, as Chesterton says, we descend into our own flesh and reenact the Incarnation in a small way. There we discover that paradox is everywhere.
The Book of Job is a powerful example. Being as such is good—and yet Job suffers. His suffering is never resolved in a neat, tidy way. When God appears, He both terrifies and consoles Job with visions of a world full of monsters and leviathans and laughing ostriches. That, too, is part of life.
The greatest paradox of all, of course, is the Incarnation: the One who is highest descends into human limitation, takes on our nature, and suffers on a cross. At Calvary, Christ is both crucified and enthroned. Paradox is woven into the very heart of our faith. What paradox does is invite us into a deep, full-bodied experience of reality—heart and mind together. It keeps us from skating along the surface, dealing only with neat, non-perplexing problems. It draws us instead into the deepest mysteries we can encounter. In that sense, paradox is a doorway, a portal into a richer experience of life and the world.
Radix: You used the word univocal, and I thought of, maybe, its opposite: the beauty of the polyphonic.
DR: Yes.
Radix: Reality is polyphonic—especially in the body of Christ. We have eyes, ears, all the different senses. If I’m an ear and you’re an eye, we’re going to experience the world differently. But if we want to experience it better, and fuller, we need to listen to one another and trust one another. Then together we can say something polyphonic to the rest of the body, and they can add their own notes. You end up with a whole beautifully singing body rather than, “No, I’m only going to see the world this one way. This is my certainty.” Paradox allows us to admit that we cannot see everything, and yet we can still be part of something larger—open to a world beyond our limited perspective. That’s really important.
DR: I think it’s wonderful that you use the senses as an example. Chesterton, especially in his book on Aquinas, writes a great deal about the senses in Thomistic terms.
I would add that even the senses themselves can be paradoxical. We often experience the world synaesthetically, not just aesthetically. A good example—on the negative side—is modern film. Many contemporary movies lack texture; they feel strangely smooth and flat. You can see something similar in many AI-generated images: the richness and grain that we see with our eyes and, in a sense, feel in our bodies is missing. Everything is surface. That flattened-out world is a good metaphor for why we need paradox. If we exclude complexity—accidentally or deliberately—we amputate parts of reality that we were meant to encounter. Paradox helps us recover depth, texture, and the full range of what is really there.
Radix: Let me ask about joy. My question is a bit clumsy, but I wondered if Chesterton sees joy not just as a mood but almost as a metaphysical stance. What do you think?
DR: I love that. I’d say you’ve placed a metaphysical melody into a phenomenological key.
Radix: Forgive my ignorance. Could you explicate that?
DR: You’ve taken something metaphysical—concerned with what is actual and potential, real and unreal—and translated it into the realm of lived experience. Metaphysics helps us understand the nature of things. Joy, however, lets us encounter that reality in our embodied lives, rather than just contemplate it abstractly. So we might say that you’ve transposed a metaphysical theme into the key of experience.
I should mention also in terms of joy and Chesterton that it’s important to remember that he was not naïve about suffering. He went through seasons of chronic depression. He lived with real sorrow, including the struggles of his wife’s family—her brother, who was very ill and ultimately took his own life—and the painful trials of his own brother, who later died in the First World War. Chesterton knew how hard life could be. You can see this in his wartime essays for the Illustrated London News. At points, the usual levity disappears; you can almost feel how heavy his inner world was. Yet he insisted that melancholy should be a brief interlude, and that joy should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.[7]
Joy was, for him, what we are ultimately made for. He even noted that this is one of the great secrets hidden in the Gospels: Jesus does not appear as overtly jovial. There are no recorded instances of Him laughing. Chesterton believed that the joy of Christ was too deep, too interior, to be merely displayed on the surface. It is the great, secret gladness at the heart of Christianity.
Joy, in this sense, is not merely a passing feeling but our underlying connection to what is deepest and truest. One may not feel joyful at a particular moment, and yet joy can remain the most real thing. The simple fact that we yearn for it—that even in our suffering, like Job, we long for the end of sorrow—reveals something. Aidan Nichols suggests that Chesterton effectively offers an argument from joy for the Christian faith: why should this yearning exist at all? From a purely naturalistic or materialistic standpoint, the persistent desire for joy seems arbitrary. It makes more sense if joy points beyond itself to a higher reality. Very roughly put, Chesterton helps us see that we are made for joy, and that this longing is inescapable—even when we ourselves are not joyful.
Radix: Since it’s Christmas, and Chesterton wrote so beautifully about it, is there anything in particular you love about what he says regarding Christmas?
DR: In The Everlasting Man, he has an exquisite description of the Nativity. He notes that at Christmas we welcome the homeless—the Christ Child, St. Mary, and St. Joseph—into our homes. There’s a paradox in that: we invite the One who has no place to lay His head into our place of comfort. He also speaks of how the hands that made the universe were too small to reach out and touch the faces of the animals in the stable. It’s a stunning image of self-giving: the Creator as a helpless infant.
Chesterton also commented on wealthy people, observing that many are quite willing to give money, but struggle to give themselves. They struggle to become a gift. At Christmas, we are shown in the most concrete way what genuine self-giving looks like. So Christmas becomes a reminder of God’s generosity and the generosity of being itself. And then comes the invitation: we are called to join in that generosity.
Radix: There’s that line of his—I’m paraphrasing—that people are grateful for their Christmas socks, but he’s grateful for the legs that go in the socks.[8] That constant turn toward gratitude—for existence, for being alive at all.
DR: Yes, exactly. He reminds us of what we usually overlook. How often do we put on socks in the morning and think, “This foot is wonderful; it will carry me through the day”? We become over-habituated to things and forget them. We forget the obvious. For Chesterton, that’s one of the central tasks of imagination: not primarily to invent fantastical worlds, but to reconnect us with reality—to bring us into contact with what is most present and most real. He doesn’t see imagination first as escape, but as a way of seeing truly. In his biography of St. Thomas, he writes that God made human beings to have contact with reality, and that whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder,[9] or words to that effect. We are meant for this contact.
Christmas, in a strange way, reintroduces us to that contact. I was driving through Pretoria just a few nights ago, coming back from an exhibition at work. It was the first of December, Advent had begun, and there were Christmas lights everywhere. It was as if people had put their own little stars out—stars on the ground as well as in the sky. It felt strange and magical. And I think that’s part of the gift of Christmas: it helps us see even our ordinary streets and homes—our trees and lights and decorations—as places where wonder is invited.
Radix: Oh, that’s lovely. That’s really good.
I like to ask guests this question, and I’ll preface it a bit. I believe pastors and clergy have a great deal of influence, and if I were a pastor, I would want to hear from many different perspectives. Everyone has a unique angle, and it’s a gift when that can be shared. So, if you had all the pastors in a room—and they were listening to you, smiling, receptive—you can speak for yourself or, if you like, for Chesterton as well: what would you want to tell them?
DR: I have many thoughts—how to put them down … You know, Chesterton has a lovely essay, often titled, “If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach.” In it, he says the biggest problem we face is the oldest problem: pride. I think that insight connects directly to mental health.
Some of the worst approaches to therapy, in my view, are those that simply affirm people in their sense of self as it already is. Chesterton would see that as a serious problem. Of course we need comfort; we need to know we belong, that there is grace and love to catch us when life is hard. I believe he would affirm all of that. But to encourage people to remain stuck in their pride is essentially to encourage them to live in unreality. If instead we can help people confront their pride, repent of it, offload their ego and lock it away, they would actually be happier—happier in the Aristotelian sense of true human flourishing. Getting the self out of the way makes space to be awed and inspired by other people, by the world, and by God.
It’s interesting that much pastoral care today tends toward reassuring people that they really don’t need to worry about much—that everyone is fine, everyone is basically saved, nothing needs to change. On the surface, that sounds kind and comforting. But Chesterton would say that it actually builds a cage around people, locking them inside themselves and shrinking the vast, adventurous world they have been given.
Many of the miseries people face come from that loss of scale. We forget that genuine mental health has a moral structure. It involves learning what to value, where to find meaning, how to direct desire. And for that, we need humility. We need to eat a good helping of humble pie. Stillness, slowness, simplicity—all of that helps. But first, pride has to go.
Radix: And to go back to criticism, I think in that same sermon he says something like, Heaven was cracked by a sneer.[10] That sneer is an act of pride, right? It comes from a position of the self. It lacks the humility to be open to what is outside us. When we are truly open in the right way, we are far more likely to be in a posture to receive goodness—from God, from the world, from other people.
DR: Yes, exactly. The philosopher William Desmond, whom I write about a bit in my second book, describes our being as porosity: we are porous to the world. But he also speaks of clogged porosities. The sneer is a good example of that. It shoves little plugs into the parts of us that should be open and receptive, and it shuts us off from what would delight us. Chesterton saw that clearly.
When he was asked why he became a Catholic, he famously replied, “To get rid of my sins.” Even though there is now a formal bid in the Catholic Church to have him recognized as a saint—and I do believe he was a holy man—he never lost sight of sin as the central problem. He shows us what it means to stand in the middle of the mess and muck of life and yet still see holiness in it. Perhaps precisely because he was a holy man, he understood that the real wound is sin, and that we need healing from it. Mental and spiritual health cannot be separated from that reality.
Radix: One last question: for someone who doesn’t really know Chesterton but has maybe heard of him through someone like C. S. Lewis, where would you recommend they begin? What would be your top few biographies, and what are the first three or four books they should start with?
DR: That’s a great question. I always suggest people start with The Defendant, which he wrote in 1901. It’s a short collection of light essays, and it gives a wonderful feel for his style. It captures his humor and his philosophy, even though it predates his explicit Christian commitment. After that, I’d recommend Tremendous Trifles, another book of essays. From there, it depends on a person’s interests, because Chesterton wrote in almost every genre. If you’re drawn to theology, you really must read Orthodoxy. It’s the book I’ve reread more than any other in my life. In terms of biographies, I still think Joseph Pearce’s Wisdom and Innocence is the best full-length life of Chesterton.
I would add a caution: it’s usually a mistake to begin with The Everlasting Man. It’s his most difficult and in many ways his most brilliant work. But even very gifted readers often get lost in it. I have an unconventional piece of advice for that book: start at the back and read it chapter by chapter in reverse order—like the film Memento, which begins at the end and works backward. Doing that can give readers who are struggling a much clearer sense of what Chesterton is arguing. It’s the only Chesterton book I’d actively recommend reading backwards.
Perhaps one more thing: I think Dale Ahlquist has done more than anyone to help people appreciate Chesterton. Any one of his books on Chesterton belongs near the top of the list for someone looking for a good introduction.
Radix: Have you had much chance to talk with Ahlquist?
DR: We’ve exchanged some emails. He was very kind to endorse my second book. Because of that, David Deavel—who is wonderful—reviewed The Roots of the World in Gilbert magazine and said some very generous things about it. Dale has been very encouraging to me, even though I’m the odd figure: the Chesterton scholar trying to bring Chesterton into the academic world. There’s still a tendency to treat him as “just” a journalist, a writer of popular books. But “popular” books from a hundred years ago are very different from many popular books today. And to be honest, I think he’s more intelligent than most academics alive right now—by quite a distance.
Radix: He really is incredible. C. S. Lewis once made a disparaging comment about much of Chesterton’s journalistic work being ephemeral. Every time I give a presentation on Chesterton, I say something like: “We can forgive Lewis this great sin—he clearly didn’t read them.” I mean Lewis thought very highly of Chesterton, and said so openly, but that comment annoyed me.
I’m currently working through the Illustrated London News pieces from 1911 to 1913, and then the ones from 1914 to 1916. The wartime material can be heavy—you think, “All right, we get it, the Prussians are bad.” But even there, these brilliant words appear out of nowhere. There are very few people like him.
DR: It’s interesting. I love C. S. Lewis and think he’s one of the most wonderful writers. But when you read Lewis, you’re often, in a way, also reading Chesterton and George MacDonald refracted through him.
Radix: [Loudly] So true!
DR: Also, we need to remember that Lewis was far more controlled as a writer. We sometimes forget that Chesterton’s paychecks came from writing. He didn’t have a university post or a stable salaried position elsewhere. If he didn’t produce, he didn’t get paid. That partly explains his unbelievable output. He wrote more than Bertrand Russell, who is often cited as the most prolific British philosopher. Chesterton outstrips him in word count: over nine thousand essays and close to a hundred books. Given that scale, it’s understandable that he would sometimes repeat himself or say frivolous things.
But I find some rich thinking in precisely those “ephemeral” pieces. In my second book, I quote the Illustrated London News essays constantly. There’s an astonishing wealth of subtle reasoning and insight in them. One of my recent favorites is a piece he calls “The Symbolism of Syntax.” He argues that punctuation and sentence structure tell you as much about a person as the explicit content of what they say. He’s really probing the form behind the thought—the formal cause, as it were. It’s ingenious: and to think that this idea is popping into his head over a cup of tea, which he then spins into a philosophically fascinating reflection.
So yes, perhaps it was a slight “sneer” on Lewis’s part. A small failure to remember that Chesterton was a working journalist and had to write a lot. But if you love the man—and it’s hard not to once you truly read him—you begin to see even those offhand pieces as part of a remarkable mind at work.
Radix: Right, right. Yes. Remarkable, indeed. Duncan, thank you so very, very much for all of this. And for your work on Chesterton.
[1] Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself. (“If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach.”)
[2] The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder. (Tremendous Trifles.)
[3][The book of Job is] better worth hearing than any modern philosophical conversation in the whole philosophical world. (“Introduction to the Book of Job”)
[4] I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. (A Short History of England)
[5] Optimism is said to be unpopular just at present, and optimism in criticism lies under a specially withering disdain. But for all that criticism will have to become more optimistic or lose altogether its hold upon the future. The only bad thing about criticism is its name. It is derived from a word signifying a criminal judge, and hitherto it has in consequence been supposed that criticism had to do with literary crimes. The favourable judgment of the critic has always been, in the ordinary opinion, to acquit a man of a sin, not to convict him of a merit. If criticism were in a sound state it would have discovered [even one thing to value], instead of … half a hundred negative ones. (“The Death of Swinburne”)
[6] The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises — he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. … The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind. (Orthodoxy)
[7] Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. (Orthodoxy)
[8] Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth? (Orthodoxy)
[9] The essence of the Thomist common sense is that two agencies are at work; reality and the recognition of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage. Indeed it is very truly a marriage, because it is fruitful; the only philosophy now in the world that really is fruitful. It produces practical results, precisely because it is the combination of an adventurous mind and a strange fact. … Anyhow, upon that marriage, or whatever it may be called, the whole system of St. Thomas is founded; God made Man so that he was capable of coming in contact with reality; and those whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder. (St. Thomas Aquinas: ‘The Dumb Ox’)
[10] The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven. (“If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach.”)