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When someone asked Chesterton what one book he would want to have along if stranded on a desert island, he paused only an instant before replying, "Why, A Practical Guide to Shipbuilding, of course." If I were so stranded, and could choose one book apart from the Bible, I may well select Chesterton's own spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy (1909). Why anyone would pick up a book with that formidable title eludes me, but one day I did so and my faith has never recovered. Orthodoxy brought freshness and a new spirit of adventure to my faith as I found odd parallels between my own odyssey and that traveled by its author, a 300-pound, scatterbrained Victorian journalist.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton has sometimes been called "the master who left no masterpiece," perhaps the curse of his chosen profession. For most of his life (1874-1936) he served as editor of a weekly newspaper of ideas, in the process writing some 4,000 essays on topics both trivial and important. He straddled the turn of the century, from the 19th to the 20th, when such movements as modernism, communism, fascism, pacifism, determinism, Darwinism, and eugenics were coming to the fore. As he surveyed each one, he found himself pressed further and further toward Christianity, which he saw as the only redoubt against such potent forces. Eventually he accepted the Christian faith not simply as a bulwark of civilization but rather as an expression of the deepest truths about the world. He took the public step of being baptized into the Roman Catholic church in a mostly Protestant nation.

As a thinker, Chesterton started slowly. By the age of 9, he could barely read, and his parents consulted with a brain specialist about his mental capacity. He dropped out of art school and skipped university entirely. As it turned out, however, he had a memory so prodigious that late in life he could recite the plots of all 10,000 novels he had read and reviewed. He wrote five novels of his own, as well as 200 short stories, including a series of detective stories centered on Father Brown; tried his hand at plays, poetry, and ballads; wrote literary biographies of such characters as Robert Browning and Charles Dickens; spun off a history of England; and tackled the lives of Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, and Jesus himself. Writing at breakneck speed, getting many facts wrong, he nevertheless approached each of his subjects with such discernment, enthusiasm, and wit that even his harshest critics had to stand and applaud.

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September 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 11