Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #8: Saint Gilbert, the Apostle of Joy, the Prophet of Paradox, and the Political Theory of Distributism: G.K. Chesterton
Wonder as rebellion. That's the surprising path Gilbert Keith Chesterton blazed through the intellectual landscape of early 20th century England—and precisely why his voice feels so startlingly relevant to our screen-addicted, anxiety-ridden modern world.
Born into the spiritual uncertainty of late Victorian England, Chesterton emerged as perhaps the most joyful apologist Christianity has ever known. Where others defended faith with stern dogmatism, he championed orthodoxy with wit, paradox, and an infectious sense of delight. His prodigious output—over 4,000 newspaper columns, hundreds of poems, novels, plays, and theological works—reveals a mind that refused to be constrained by false dichotomies or rigid thinking.
What makes Chesterton particularly fascinating was his approach to intellectual combat. Unlike the polarized, winner-take-all debates of our time, Chesterton maintained genuine friendships with his philosophical opponents. He debated socialist George Bernard Shaw and progressive scientist H.G. Wells dozens of times, always with respect, humor, and a willingness to acknowledge their insights even while disagreeing with their conclusions. When he wrote that "bigotry is not believing you're right; bigotry is not admitting when you're wrong," he offered a model of discourse desperately needed in our fractured public sphere.
Perhaps Chesterton's most enduring contribution was his political philosophy of distributism—a "third way" between unfettered capitalism and state socialism. Alongside his friend Hilaire Belloc, he advocated for an economic system where property ownership would be widely distributed among families and small producers rather than concentrated in corporations or government. Though never mainstream, these ideas continue to influence conversations about economic justice, localism, and sustainability today.
For those struggling with the spiritual aridity of modern life, Chesterton offers a transformative insight: orthodoxy is not a retreat from the world but its re-enchantment. His ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary—to maintain that the world doesn't lack wonders but only our capacity for wonder—provides a powerful antidote to cynicism and despair. When he wrote that "angels can fly because they take themselves lightly," he was inviting us to recover a perspective that combines deep seriousness about truth with the lightness of joy and humor.
Ready to discover how a 300-pound man with a sword cane and cigar became one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern age? Dive into this exploration of Chesterton's life, works, and continuing relevance for anyone seeking to maintain faith, wonder, and intellectual integrity in challenging times.
Gil
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
And so there's a lot of witty banter in there, arguing about whether it's better to build wealth and then distribute it to the poor, or to hold to your idealism and serve the poor by living poorly by living poorly.
Speaker 1:And, of course, chesterton had his own Christian answer to that, which was well sure, you have a vibrant market and you have a strong capitalist economy, but you don't let it accumulate into the hands of the few, but you make sure that there's a distribution network. That's one of the other things of Chesterton was when he's talking about wonder, and you quoted those sections about. You know, we live in a universe of wonders, but we're losing our capacity to wonder and this incapacity to wonder feeds our anxiety and depression and addiction to screens.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. I'm your host, travis Mullen, and I'm excited to have you with us. This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general judeo-christian revelation of god in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 3:It's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story, packed with drama.
Speaker 2:Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874, in Kensington, london, into a warm middle-class family with literary leanings and spiritual curiosity. His father worked for a real estate firm but was also a creative spirit, a man who filled the family home with books and art and amateur theatrical productions. Chesterton inherited that blend of practicality and wonder and from a young age he was more interested in drawing than debating, more inclined to wonder than to worry. Chesterton's childhood was, by his own account, happily sheltered. Yet England was in transition. The late Victorian era was a time of empire and industry, but also of deep spiritual uncertainty. The old religious certainties were crumbling under the pressure of scientific rationalism, urban poverty and moral relativism. The optimism of the Enlightenment was giving way to the confusion of modernism In this world.
Speaker 2:Chesterton was born a boy with a sketchpad, a booming laugh and a mind like a kaleidoscope. He was educated at St Paul's School and later attended the Slade School of Art. He never earned a degree. By his early 20s he was struggling with depression and spiritual darkness, even experimenting with the occult. But he also began reading widely, particularly Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, st Francis of Assisi and even the mystics. These alongside his philosophical sense of justice and love of common people began to slowly shape the man who would become the most joyful apologist of the 20th century.
Speaker 2:Chesterton came of age as a writer during a period of enormous ideological conflict. Industrial capitalism had created vast wealth and deep inequality. Marxism and socialism were offering materialist solutions to spiritual problems. Scientific positivism provided objectivity but delivered a sterile and mechanistic worldview. Chesterton saw these trends not as progress but as forms of forgetting forgetting beauty, personhood, forgetting mystery and the miracle of existence. He responded not with bitter protest but with wonder. He believed that the true rebellion was to embrace gratitude in the face of nihilism and to affirm the goodness of the world rather than simply deconstruct it. But Chesterton's vision wasn't limited to the realm of ideas. He also sought practical alternatives to the economic and political systems he found dehumanizing.
Speaker 2:Alongside his friend Hilaire Balak, chesterton helped popularize a political philosophy known as distributism, a bold and subversive third way between the excesses of capitalism and the coercion of socialism. Rooted in Catholic social teaching, especially Pope Leo VIII's Rerum Novarum, distributism argued that economic freedom and dignity could only be preserved if property was widely distributed among families, craftsmen and small farmers, not hoarded by monopolies or managed by the state. Chesterton didn't invent the theory, but he gave it its moral heart and imaginative power. In works like what's Wrong with the World and the Outline of Sanity, he laid out his dream of a society built not on greed or government control, but on subsidiarity, stewardship and joy. Though it never became a mainstream political movement, at least not yet, distributism inspired movements like the Catholic Workers and lives on in conversations about localism, sustainability and the humane economy. It was yet another way Chesterton challenged the powerful assumptions of his age with reason, laughter and a deep belief in the sacredness of ordinary life.
Speaker 2:As a journalist and essayist, he was prolific, writing over 4,000 newspaper columns, hundreds of poems, novels, plays and theological works. He never seemed to stop writing, thinking or debating. Thinking or debating. His best-known works include Orthodoxy 1908, in which he lays out his spiritual autobiography, arguing that Christianity is the only worldview that takes the world seriously enough to rejoice in it. In the Everlasting man in 1925, he offered a sweeping vision of history that so impressed a young atheist named CS Lewis that it helped lead to his conversion.
Speaker 2:Chesterton's writing style was unique whimsical but pointed, paradoxical, profoundly moral. He was a master of turning ideas on their heads to make them shine in a new light. He would say things like angels can fly because they take themselves lightly, or the madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything but his reason. These were not just clever lines. They were spiritual diagnostics of modern man's condition.
Speaker 2:Though he was a Christian long before, chesterton officially converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1922, at the age of 48, after years of spiritual searching, his faith wasn't abstract or merely doctrinal. It was incarnational, mystical and sacramental. He saw the Christian story as the truest fairy tale ever told the infinite becoming finite, the creator becoming creature, the crucified Christ offering redemption through suffering and joy. Economically, chesterton's life was modest. He was never wealthy, nor was he particularly concerned with money. He lived simply with his wife, frances, to whom he was deeply devoted. She managed much of his business affairs and kept him grounded. His fame did not translate into fortune, but his influence far exceeded the financial and far exceeded his lifetime.
Speaker 2:Chesterton's work left a permanent mark on modern Christian thought. He helped revive the intellectual credibility of orthodoxy at a time when it was considered obsolete. He inspired CS Lewis, jrr Tolkien, dorothy Day, marshall McLuhan and even popes and political dissidents. His words continue to echo in places where laughter, wonder and truth still matter. Chesterton died in 1936, but he remains, paradoxically, one of the most contemporary voices we can read today.
Speaker 2:In a world addicted to cynicism, chesterton teaches us laughter. In a world obsessed with progress, he invites us to rediscover the miracle of being. And in a culture that believes faith must be narrow, chesterton reminds us that orthodoxy is in fact a wild and generous adventure, as Robert N Chostey puts it in Subversive Orthodoxy, chesterton's genius was to show us that orthodoxy is not a retreat from the world, but the re-enchantment of it. He didn't defend Christianity as an escape from reality, but as the only worldview that makes reality bearable, because it is beautiful, purposeful and anchored in joy. And with no further ado, I'd like to bring on my counterpart to this podcast, of whom who wrote the books the Verse of Orthodoxy, mr Professor Robert Enchasti. Hey, travis, good to see you, welcome professor thanks for uh.
Speaker 1:Thanks for doing another podcast episode with me well, this is going to be a fun one, uh a lot of fun a very fun one yeah
Speaker 2:so to give our readers a little, that was some of the bio. Now here's. Here's a little rundown of his notable works 1904. He wrote the Napoleon of Notting Hill, a sector, a satirical novel. In 1905, he wrote heretics where he was actually. He was actually critiquing intellectual writers of his day HG Wells, george Bernard, sean Rudyard, rudyard Kipling and professor is going to tell us about how he actually ended up debating them in person too. Orthodoxy, 1908, which was his spiritual autobiography. The man who Was Thursday A Nightmare. 1908, a Philosophical Thriller, which sounds awesome. There's a couple here I'd never heard about and they sound awesome and I'll point out the one that sounds the coolest in a second.
Speaker 2:What's what's wrong with the world, political and social commentary. And this is the book where he talks about distributism partially and he talks a lot about the family and like just social fabric of society, which in a lot of our public debates like, for example, so relevant to this when he wrote what's Wrong with the World. He talks so much about family, the church, the social fabrics that we used to have in society, at least in the Western European and American societies, that that was some of the solutions was the family, was the church, was the local community in his writings, was the family, was the church, was the local community in his writings. And today I was listening to Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan. It just happened, like I think, in the last week, and you know I don't hear Bernie Sanders having that imagination about family, about churches, about social communities. It's all about government. That's a big difference of what we have today versus what a thinker like Chesterton was thinking, like he had other ways of solving problems other than government, which is really interesting.
Speaker 2:Father Brown Stories is 1910, a detective fiction, which is interesting. He's all over the place with these types of books. The Ballad of the White Horse is 1911, an epic poem. And then my favorite that I have not read but just I found out about it, was the Flying In, and this is a fiction, satirical dystopia, and the synopsis was kind of really intriguing to me. In a future England where alcohol is banned and political correctness reigns, a pub on wheels becomes a symbol of rebellion and joy. That one sounds awesome.
Speaker 2:Then the Everlasting man, 1925, christian Apologetics, and that's the book that led CS Lewis to Christ, in a sense had an impact on him and helped him in his conversion. Then another one on Francis of Assisi, assisi, 1923, a biography of spiritual commentary, and then another one. Another biography on thomas aquinas, 1933, the dumb ox, another biography and theology. Reason orthodoxy are not enemies, they're allies in the pursuit of truth was kind of his theme on that one. And then last one, uh, here for notable works the Thing why I Am Catholic, 1929, essays and Apologetics. He claimed that the Catholic Church is not a prison but a home full of strange treasures.
Speaker 2:As far as some of his themes, you'll notice some continued threads from Kierkegaard. Number one is paradox. Truth often comes cloaked in contradiction, wonder, which was also seen in Kierkegaard. The ordinary is sacred when it's seen rightly. Tradition versus modernity Same, you know, we've seen that thread through a lot of these guys. Progress must be grounded in enduring truths, personhood and freedom and freedom. A lot about freedom in um in chesterton, joy as rebellion. Now laughter and festivities. And you know, creativity in general seems to be a huge thing for him and that must have been passed down to cs lewis. They both had that poetry, had the comedy. Cs lewis and tolkien Tolkien drew too. He drew his own illustrations. Yeah, these guys are very artistic and intellectual, that's right. But when I was coming up, when I was coming of age, theology was in its own little ghetto like walls. It had its walls, like it was just the just theology.
Speaker 2:There was no overlap with creativity. I mean, we knew about CS Lewis, but we were just talking about mere Christianity. We weren't diving into the space trilogy or anything. I don't know where all that got lost on me, like from the Christianity of Chesterton and Lewis to my generation in America. You know where did they chop art out of the equation?
Speaker 1:Well, theology got very academic, didn't it? Yeah, I think that's. And theologians talking to theologians. The CS Lewis was Oxford Don, right, and what was that? Cs Lewis was a Don from Oxford, right? Was that? Uh, cs lewis was a don from oxford, right. He had a, he went to college and he was a professor. And um, tolkien, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. Can you just tell me what a don means in that context?
Speaker 1:uh like a um tenured professor at oxford okay, yeah, I didn't know that yeah and uh. Then, uh, tolkien was yeah, and then Tolkien was, you know, a first rate scholar of languages and a graduate from, I think, cambridge, yeah. And so, like Chesterton didn't graduate from college and he went right into journalism and he considered himself a journalist his whole life and he wrote columns in newspapers.
Speaker 2:Thousands, thousands of them. He said 4,000.
Speaker 1:and essays and you can get a lot of them for free on the internet. You can get a lot of them. You can see some of them on youtube. They have people read, they read them to you and and those aren't them. You know, those are in addition to those major works that you mentioned that people recognize as Chesterton's sort of canon of great works. But he became famous, you know, he had these public events where he'd take on all the top intellectuals of England of his day and they'd pack houses and not quite stadiums.
Speaker 2:I wonder if things hadn't gotten so academic at the time to let some uneducated guy debate these highly educated people, you know.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I think they probably still had debates at the Oxford Union, you know, like when Buckley debated James Baldwin. That was a major cultural event in the 60s, but they didn't have television and they didn't have radio yet right Radio was just in the coming up Infant stages.
Speaker 1:Infant stages, infant stages. So these were major sort of entertainment, intellectual events that were performances and philosophical, theological events, and every intellectual in London would show up, whether they were suffragettes or whether they were bohemian poets or whether they were atheists or whether they were believers. They'd all pack the house and they'd watch HG Wells and Gilbert.
Speaker 2:Pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, chesterton, go at it. And from all accounts, chesterton loved HG Wells. They loved each other, they respected each other, not like our people who disagree, and they disagreed on every single topic that came up. And so it was just this wonderful sort of conversation of just two guys who knew what they believed and weren't going to back down unless they were given some pretty good reasons to question themselves.
Speaker 2:And then he also did that with, uh, bernard shaw yeah, I was actually about to read that one, that one's number two on the fun facts yeah, go into the into the thing about, uh, about, george Bernard Shaw.
Speaker 1:That'd be interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, number two, on the fun facts. He debated George Bernard Shaw dozens of times, so this is a lot of times dozens of times.
Speaker 1:always respect, yeah.
Speaker 2:Always respectfully, often hilariously. You know you can imagine the crowd. The crowds are laughing, if I mean, this guy's a comic too, not just an intellectual, he's a comic. Chesterton and Shaw disagreed on nearly everything, especially politics and religion, but they remained great friends. Chesterton once said the world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.
Speaker 1:And Shaw replied yes, and.
Speaker 2:Chesterton is a wonder, so the crowd probably went wild there. Uh, here's some of the fun facts. So, uh, number one, physical stature. No, I mean, most people don't know. If they don't know much about chesterton, they don't know this fun fact. He was six foot four, 300 pounds, and he had the personality kind of like doc in Back to the Future. He was like a mad scientist, often lost in his own city. He was famously absent-minded. Once his wife sent him a telegram saying no, no. Once he sent his wife a telegram saying I am in Market Harborough, where ought I to be, to which she replied home. Before texting, he sent her a telegram saying where am I supposed to be right now?
Speaker 3:Oh man, that's funny.
Speaker 2:He always, he always carried a sword cane, a cane with a sword inside of it. Like you pull off the, you pull off the tip and there's a sword.
Speaker 2:And he said it wasn't as a gimmick. It was because he was genuine, genuinely believed life was an adventure and he was a romantic in the truest sense whimsical, dramatic and ready to duel nonsense with wit. He illustrated his own books, considered himself an artist first, before becoming a writer. He studied at the Slade School, like we mentioned, and illustrated some of his early work and remained a lifelong doodler, often sketching in the margins of his manuscripts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he might have made graphic novels had he been around to see the printing technology for that.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That would have been really great to see that.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not sure what you're saying there, Professor, because Blake was doing that before this time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. Blake and he have a lot in common, don't they?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Although I think Chesterton was wittier and more satirical and more politically engaged too. In a way as a journalist he took on social problems, and in those debates he took on big social ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sounds like extremely culturally engaged and politically as far as those debates go, because he would have been debating everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Bernard Shaw was funny too. I mean, bernard Shaw wrote Major Barbara and I don't know if you know that play, I don't know if you know that play?
Speaker 1:I don't, but it's about a young woman whose father is a rich industrialist and she is humiliated by his money and his ignorance of the poor. And so she joins the Salvation Army and she becomes a general in the Salvation Army in order to spy her father. But in the course of the play, the Salvation Army starts running out of money and a lot of their ministries are falling apart. Armies starts running out of money and a lot of their ministries are falling apart, and so her father comes to the rescue at the very end and the industrialist takes all his ill-gotten gains to fund the Salvation Army. And Bernard Shaw has this wonderful Bernard Shaw has this wonderful laugh at the end of the Christian who sacrificed everything, didn't have the money to buy the bread to pay the poor. But the industrialist who built an industrial empire now has to come to the rescue of the church, to rescue of the church.
Speaker 1:And so, um, george Bernard Shaw sort of that was his uh joke against uh social activists who who um distrusted um money-making uh capitalists, and uh, so he made the capitalist the winner of, uh, the hero of that that play, um, and so there's a lot of witty banter in there, uh arguing about whether it's better to build wealth and then distribute it, uh to the poor, uh, or to hold to your idealism and serve the poor by living poorly. And, of course, chesterton had his own Christian answer to that, which was well sure, you have a vibrant market and you have a strong capitalist economy, but you don't let it accumulate into the hands of the few, but you make sure that there's a distribution network and you don't have to wait until your daughter joins the Salvation Army to set up social institutions that can help make that a possibility.
Speaker 1:Institutions that can help make that a possibility, and so like, for example, in his debates with HG Wells. Hg Wells was this, you know, progressive scientist who had these beliefs that science and technology would solve all the economic, social problems in the long run.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And George Bernard Shaw was sort of a true believing socialist that what we have to do is we give it to the social agencies, which is not exactly distributism either, you know. And so he was. I think it was very typical of him to try to show the virtues of both sides of an argument like that and and try to synthesize some sort of answer that was reasonable but not dogmatic you know you mean chesterton would try to yeah, just like you try to synthesize and use contribution and you can thank him, you don't need to drive him out of town.
Speaker 1:And so in the Salvation Army they need to be sort of appreciated as well, and their service to the poor. And so the father and the daughter reconcile at the end in a kind of rough George Bernard Shaw satire ending, and I'm sure Chesterton appreciated the humor in it and the fact that both the industrialist and his daughter had to give up their dogmatic absolutes about economics and about religion in order to meet that center.
Speaker 2:In order to appreciate each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in order to appreciate each other, and he would try to sort of demonstrate that in his own arguments. What was it that he said that I always thought was a brilliant aphorism. It was about being—he said that bigotry is not believing that you're right. You should believe that you're right. Bigotry is not admitting that you don't live up to that, or that what you think is right maybe needs to be corrected, and that's just rationality. Right, you know, take your point of view, defend it, but if you're wrong, own up to it. Don't just try to squash the opposition, who has essentially showed you where you're wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if anything you know, it's that humility is the Christian virtue that makes thought great, Not the pride of the ideologue. And so, to the degree that a church becomes doctrinaire to United States as having all the answers or wanting to have all the answers. And so people would join the church because they wanted to know the answers to all of these impossible questions to answer. And Chesterton would say well, no, you join the church because the church knows what it believes, but then if it's wrong, you call them on it, or you don't believe what's wrong, you evolve with it and say well, you know, the church needs to evolve into a greater knowledge of itself, not just uphold its authority. And that's, you know, incredibly sane. It's. I guess you would say it's post-industrial thinking, a hundred years before its time. But at the time, I guess in the 40s and certainly at the beginning of the 20th century, ideology was considered the vehicle of thinking. You know, the Communist Party versus the democratic ideals of the West.
Speaker 2:Oh, it still is now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Your ideology is what drives your thinking.
Speaker 1:In most cases, yeah, and unfortunately yeah, yeah, I think you're right, because it makes people so um aggressive and embattled rather than listening and understanding and um trying to understand the other side's view yeah, yeah, and having a little bit of sense of humor about what you think and what you believe, and being humble enough to be educated by somebody that you wouldn't think would educate you, like maybe your daughter in Major Barbara or maybe an industrialist in Major Barbara.
Speaker 1:They might have things to teach you, but it isn't that your values are wrong, it's that you're just not doing those values well. They're not sophisticated enough in your hands and in your head yet, and there's a lot for you to still learn, and that's not a bad thing. To be able to embrace paradox is a mark of high intelligence, and to transcend the either or into the both and or, if not both, and at least the paradoxical third option that was not on the table to begin with, that's not only intelligent, but it's also, turns out, it's entertaining to the thousands of people that come to watch you in the stadium with HG Wells.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you just said something. What did you say? Paradox ability to handle paradoxes is a sign of high intelligence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it was.
Speaker 2:F Scott Fitzgerald that said that the mark of a true intelligence is to hold two contradictory truths in your mind at the same time without immediately reaching after for resolution.
Speaker 2:That resonates with me so much because I think of myself as a pretty smart person and I know sometimes, when I'm talking about something with somebody who doesn't think of themselves as very smart, like they've told me, they'll say things like I don't know how you, I don't know how you think about that, cause I'm holding two things in tension that I say well, you know, you can hold things in tension, you know, and they're like well, you know, like, for example, an older generation that wants Fox News or MSNBC, and it's like you can actually criticize both sides and have a middle view on things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but to them, to somebody who's rigidly stuck in one rut or the other, they can't do that, like it's just too much tension in the head. Yeah, they can't do that. Like it's just too much tension in the head. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not saying they're not smart, but they may have fallen into a not smart pattern where it's like you are now in, now you are in an unintelligent way of thinking, where you are stuck in a rut, where you cannot hold tension between two ideas or hold two parties accountable to not getting something right either, or like neither side has something right yeah yeah, that happens a lot too, and that's not.
Speaker 2:I'm not just talking about politics, like that could be in a lot of things, where neither answer is exactly correct, but when we have a binary, black and white thinking, we need one to be right, because there's just too much tension, otherwise I can't handle it. You know, yeah, I've seen that in people. It's really, it's really interesting, either intellectual or psychological issue.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a product of our culture, you know, and Chesterton said that, because he didn't. I mean, he went to art school, but he didn't go to college, kind of like Blake Blake. And so at one point he said you know the thing about not going to college, it gave me the freedom not to worship education.
Speaker 2:And Chesterton said that yeah, oh, I love that.
Speaker 1:And so education is a good thing, but it's not like if it addicts you to either or thinking or a kind of rationality that is weak in imagination. Empathy, ethics, joy, happiness. One of his aphorisms was a poet very seldom goes crazy, but mathematicians go crazy a lot more, because the only virtue that they embrace unquestioningly is rationality, and if they get off on the wrong foot, seeing the dark side of life, they can find themselves convinced that there is no joy. And one of the reasons Chesterton converted was because he found joy in faith. And you know, wow, and that's interesting that CS Lewis that's why I said wow, because that was his testimony too.
Speaker 1:For joy, you know? Wow, that's so weird. I never thought of that.
Speaker 2:I didn't know. Chesterton said that too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so it was reason's good and he's one of the most reasonable debaters in the world. But it isn't the final story and it doesn't replace love. And that's one of the other things of Chesterton was when he's talking about wonder, and you quoted those sections about. You know, we live in a universe of wonders, but we're losing our capacity to wonder and this incapacity to wonder feeds our anxiety and depression and addiction to screens. Although he didn't know that that would happen, that it would happen, yeah. Byproducts yeah, it would addict you to other things. So to find the joy in your experience is to see the mystery in life.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's in my book, but there's a wonderful in Orthodoxy, chesterton's book, in which I got the idea of subversive orthodoxy. When I talk about orthodoxy and subversive orthodoxy, I'm not talking about Russian orthodoxy and I'm not talking about the doctrines that are orthodox rather than heretical. I'm talking more about what Chesterton called orthodoxy, which was this much more expansive idea of the way of life that comes with Christian faith, of life that comes with Christian faith, and it's kind of like the Catholic or Christian version of the perennial philosophy that Huxley talked about. But Huxley's perennial philosophy was kind of individualistic right, the spiritual practices of the East and how it related to the. The spiritual practices of the East and how it related to the spiritual practices of the West and his view of an inner life where Chesterton's view of this larger philosophy is Christian orthodoxy that's his name for that and that includes churches and families and children and all the different aspects of a community that is trying to live the Christian vision but knows that they're just not really very good at it.
Speaker 1:And that was one of his great great. I just love the phrase. You know. He said you know people, everybody. You know, you might not think it, but most people in fact. He thought every person searched for truth and and wanted to love their neighbor. They just weren't very good at it, he said, and he included himself in that description.
Speaker 2:You know, and that's why the it's sort of like gracious and humble of a quote.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that part of being humble is sort of seeing where you don't take yourself too seriously. You think your reason is truth.
Speaker 2:You think your dogma that will be let go as the social, cultural, institutional order transforms into the next historical phase.
Speaker 1:And yeah, we'll get to that when we talk about the five deaths yeah, the five deaths.
Speaker 2:You're jumping ahead, yeah, but let's, let's, uh, let's back up a little and finish the uh fun facts and then we'll get back into uh, maybe we'll jump into the five deaths then okay um, a few of the fun ones we're still coming and they'll probably spark a few other conversations. But he number six, he dictated many of his books while lying in bed. Yeah, I love this one. He said he was often worked uh, chesterton often worked from bed due to exhaustion or illness and dictated to his ever patient secretary.
Speaker 1:He also once said that lying down was a perfectly reasonable posture for thinking, because somebody probably asked him and he's like it's a perfectly reasonable posture for thinking which I love that um number the other thing we didn't say about him is that you know he was six four and he weighed 300 pounds and he had that cane, but he also had a cigar in his mouth most of the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've seen that.
Speaker 1:So he had this big stogie that he was smoking while he's explaining the universe.
Speaker 2:So he's all about health, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he would really be an embarrassment to the fitness megachurch where giving a talk to the yoga class about Christian orthodoxy would be Now doing this deep dive on Chesterton, I knew there was a link between him and CS Lewis but I didn't know the artsy aspect, like the creative writing aspect, and also the humor aspect and the joy aspect, like that's really interesting. And one thing that really reminds me of Chesterton in CS Lewis now, now that I know all this, is his response to a homeless man. I may have told this on a previous Whose response.
Speaker 1:Chesterton's no CS Lewis.
Speaker 2:So the story goes that CS Lewis was walking with a buddy in Oxford and a homeless man was sitting there and he asked for a pound. And CS Lewis gave him a pound and the guy said why'd you give that guy money, don't you know? He's just gonna spend it on a pint. And cs lewis goes uh well figure, if I didn't give it to him, then I was just gonna spend it on a pint. Which? Is the same same humility and humor as.
Speaker 1:Chesterton yeah.
Speaker 2:So beautiful.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So then he proposed the opposite of funny isn't serious, it's dull. So dull things are not the opposite of funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He saw humor as a spiritual weapon. That's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He said Christianity is not too solemn but too serious to be taken humorlessly. That's amazing. I mean, this is not the same person you get every day. This is like a very unique person. He once joined the wrong political rally by accident.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. It was a socialist event and he went up and he started talking about distributism. I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It says, he began speaking thinking it was a different event altogether and, rather than leaving, he stayed and gave a speech critiquing both capitalism and socialism.
Speaker 1:I mean that's so amazing.
Speaker 1:I do have another story about his public lectures when he was with HG at Wells. One time he came on stage and you know he was huge stage and you know he was huge and he and he, uh, uh, you know he had his cane and his stogie and and to to call attention away from everybody that was kind of looking at him, like you know this slovenly guy who was, he said well, uh, uh, I'd like to call your attention to HG Wells, my esteemed partner today in our discussion. He's a small man but he has a big head and a long neck and a long neck and he has eyes that gaze into the future like a prophet. In short, he's kind of a combination between a giraffe and a microscope. So when you get offended by my slovenly appearance, I want you to think of that image while you're looking at HG.
Speaker 3:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:And it showed that it was both an introduction that showed that they were friends and could rib one another about their appearances could rib one another about their appearances but it also showed the tone of those events. You know that they were kind of half philosophy, half theology, half growth, comedy mixed in, comedy mixed in with, you know witticisms and things That'd be fun if we had that back.
Speaker 2:That platform does not exist right now.
Speaker 1:I don't think yeah, yeah, only in the only in the roast. But they, they've gotten. The roasts have gotten so kind of mean-spirited in some ways. You know they try to uh put yourself down and and uh, occasionally you'll get a, a good spirited one, but but chesterton apparently was like that all the time okay, and then our last two fun facts, and then we're moving on he inspired.
Speaker 2:He inspired cs lewis conversion, which we already mentioned, but cs lewis said that that the book, chesterton's book, the everlasting man. He said the quote, the book, quote unquote the book that baptized my intellect. And then, last one, he was nominated for sainthood. Uh, seriously, in 2013, the bishop of northampton opened an investigation into chesterton's cause for canonization. While it hasn't advanced formally due to debates about his legacy and some theological concerns, many Catholics still refer to him affectionately as St Gilbert, st Gilbert.
Speaker 1:Well, you know I'm thinking, and this is just speculation.
Speaker 1:But the Cold War, you know the ideological wars of the 20s and 30s and the Cold War that followed made common sense an enemy of the people by all these extremists of the right and the left, and theology got very almost turned into philosophy, analytic philosophy and all of these, and textual criticism and textual criticism and new criticism and all of the trying to turn the humanities into soft sciences, make them a little more science than soft. Maybe made it harder for Chesterton, who was simply a middle-class British Christian with an IQ of about 3,000 or whatever it was, made it a little harder for him to enter sainthood. I mean, what were they going to make him a doctor of the church? I mean he had no theory. He wasn't trading theories of anthropology with Delphi or other major systems builders systems builders and maybe it's time to bring back the inquiry into his sainthood because he's probably offering us something we need for the next phase of Western civilization that's got to break out of its ideological blinders and preoccupation with certainty and all of those.
Speaker 2:I feel like this podcast is about that. It's about finding in each of these people what can take us forward. Yeah, and I think some of them it's like breadcrumbs, but then some of them it might be a whole modality, like chesterton and kierkegaard. Yeah, yeah, I mean. I mean a whole way of thinking, whole, whole um infrastructure of values yes not just one value.
Speaker 2:you know, like you got with solstice, and you have the deep honesty and like the thread goes through all of us that turns these people into animals. Yeah, you have there's. There's a real morality you get from Solzhenitsyn, yeah, but you don't get a whole framework of of worldview, but with Kierkegaard and Chesterton, you get. You get, like you know, 10 things that are all interconnected, that they're proposing, which is very, very exciting and invigorating to to learn about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, Well, and and you know, you can imagine Chesterton, you know, taking Solson, hits it out for a beer. I imagine they would. They would get along and they would have a lot to say to each other, especially in terms of their shared faith. But at a certain point I have a feeling that Solzhenitsyn would get very serious. Yeah, and Chesterton would listen. I'm sure that's what he would do, Because he would be in the presence of somebody who knew some things about suffering and about how dark things could get that he could learn from. But I don't think he would give up his joy. I think he would afterwards find the humor even in that and in the overreach even in that, which would be why we need a Saint Chesterton.
Speaker 2:And I also think Saint Gilbert could have been a nice pick-me-up for Kierkegaard when he's depressed.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah, they could have been buddies on YouTube or something.
Speaker 2:Well, and the way they wrote creatively, and Kierkegaard with his pseudonyms.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Imagine what they could have done in a debate style.
Speaker 1:Oh right, of writing together yeah, the, uh, the multiple personalities and things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they both have that extreme creativity of thought. Uh, with thought, you know uh-huh, yeah, that's so true let's move into our um five, five deaths concept from him and I'll read the couple paragraphs from the book, from your book, and then I'll say my take about it in relation to deconstruction, and then I want to hear your thoughts on it Okay. On how significant of a concept this was. This was in his Everlasting man right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's chapter six in Everlasting man.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this is on page 16 of Subversive Orthodoxy Professor's book where he's this is not the chapter. If any of you are following along with the book. This isn't in the chapter on Chesterton. This is actually in the original intro of the whole book. So I believe yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's on like page two of the whole book, Page 16 of the intro, yeah, which is page two of the actual book.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, Of the text, okay, as it starts to talk. So I'm going to read two paragraphs here because I feel, I feel like I underlined them all, I had all these notes and and how much it related to current deconstruction. Um, in our, in our culture, and we're gonna hit the pause button there for the end of episode eight, which is part one of chesterton. You can look for part two right behind. It will be coming out simultaneously.
Speaker 2:I hope you're resonating with the powerful ideas and stories of these people, especially Chesterton, right now. It might hit you different depending on where you're spiritually located, whether you're a skeptic or a believer or somewhere in between, on some kind of deconstruction journey. We're going to be continuing to explore what it means to live a life of deep meaning in a world that often feels fragmented and nihilistic. And this revelatory faith doesn't seem to come to us from the expected places. The prophetic voice doesn't seem to come from the pulpits and the seminaries. All the time it's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the unexpected corners of culture. In Chesterton we find that the prophetic voice is coming in the form of laughter and joy, which is amazing. We hope you'll continue to join us on this ongoing conversation Until then. Thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast. If you love our podcast and find it meaningful, please leave a five-star review, subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation. Star review, subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation.
Speaker 3:This has been a subversive orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor in trust. I want to jump off a cliff without a parachute, like I'm high on cannabis, and skip through fields naked, like I wonder if I could drift, or if I could drift through it, dancing through moonlight under nighttime skies, forgetting the world's lies. Meanwhile I'm fine Looking through a stained glass oceanic scene. Say hi to human beings with a smile unseen, grabbing wildflowers as I slide down hills after the rain.