G. K. Chesterton, Theologian

One of the greatest Catholic minds of the twentieth century was a journalist, playwright, novelist, literary critic, poet, cartoonist, essayist, broadcaster, and even president of the Detection Club.

But he was also a theologian.

G. K. Chesterton, famous for defending Christian belief in his books Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man (the latter helped to convert C.S. Lewis) could not help thinking theologically — even when he was making jokes — and his writings illuminate the profoundest religious themes.

In his hands, Christian truth is rescued from becoming a purely academic exercise. He gives us an "experience of the fullness and many-sidedness of the truth, in which the Christian can romp without a care" (Balthasar).

In fact, like Lewis, Chesterton, who was one of the great converts of the twentieth century, draws us directly into an encounter with the Word of God, showing us the faith of the Church as most of us have never seen it before. No wonder Pope Benedict XVI tells us that "in every age the path to faith can take its bearings by converts."

But Chesterton wrote so much — literally millions of words in thousands of essays and books — that the average reader may feel daunted. There has never been one book that introduces his thoughts on God and the Church ... until now, courtesy of the wise Dominican priest, Aidan Nichols.

In these pages, Fr. Nichols has gathered the most powerful theological passages from the many works of Chesterton, and included his own concise explanations of the keen and sometimes surprising ways they illuminate the most profound questions ever asked by man.

Readers new to Chesterton as well as his lifelong fans will delight in the fresh light he sheds here on the existence of God, the nature of man, the meaning of Christ, and the universal call to holiness, which in these pages rings out as loudly as it did when G.K. Chesterton first wrote these words over a century ago.

Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., of Blackfriars, Cambridge, is a lecturer in Cambridge University and a most prolific writer of theology in the English language. He has published on countless topics, especially in systematic, sacramental, and ecumenical theology, and was awarded the title Sacrae Theologiae Magister by the Dominican order in 2003. His books include important studies of St. Thomas Aquinas; modern thinkers, including Hans Urs von Balthasar; and the theology of Pope Benedict XVI. He has written on the liturgical“reform of the reform” and on “re-energising the Church in Culture,” as well as on the arts and iconography. The present book is based on a series of lectures given as the John Paul II Memorial Lecturer at the University of Oxford — the first Catholic Lectureship created in the university since the Reformation.