/lit/ - Literature

>>12847279
Chesterton is more powerful against Nietzsche than this board gives him credit for. Chesterton attacks Nietzsche from the side, as it were, but it's still a potent assault.

Nietzsche and Chesterton are my go-to aphoristic guys. Chesterton's essays are basically just bunches of aphorisms organized into paragraphs.

>>11771180
This.

What people need to understand is that Chesterton is trying to invoke a religious experience in his readers. His writing's primary goal is to establish in his readers a connection with the otherworldly, a sensation of the presence of the Divine.

That's why Chesterton focuses so much on paradoxes. By forcing the reader to confront something that doesn't initially look like it can be true, but that actually turns out to be true after all, Chesterton is trying to awe and astonish his readers in the same way we might be awed and astonished if God himself appeared in their midst. He is trying to lead his readers to have a mystical, an otherworldly encounter with a Truth that surpasses the normal bounds of human understanding.

It doesn't work on everybody, of course. But it can be highly effective.

Everyone knows that Chesterton did almost everything it's possible to do with the written word. But what was he best at? Was he best as a poet? An essayist? A novelist? A short story writer? A dramatist? A philosopher? A hymnist?

The Catholic Church will respond to this by making GK Chesterton a saint. His cause for canonization is being formally investigated, you can look it up.

I have found that most people who do not like Chesterton ultimately feel that way because at some point or another they came across him BTFOing some argument they had about some issue or another.

This is pretty much Christopher Hitchens' problem with him, I think.

>>11137884
Peterson wishes he were as smart or as funny as Chesterton. Old Gilbert would probably have demolished him in a debate.

Do you have a favorite essay, /lit/? Maybe we can share them.

I really like Chesterton's essay from Heretics, "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family."

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/470/470-h/470-h.htm#chap14

https://www.lifezette.com/faithzette/why-chesterton-moment-arrived-church/

>formal investigation for canonization has started

HAPPENING

>Best fat author

Was it Chesterton?

>>10360061
I think Chesterton would say in response to that that you're correct. The average soldier IS better than Tolstoy or Nietzsche, because the average soldier has to confront and live through the things that Tolstoy and Nietzsche could only assume and conjure. And I don't see that as a glorification of military service. I see it as an acknowledgment that ultimately Tolstoy and Nietzsche are only playing pretend. Their ideas are powerful and potent, but those ideas spring from hypotheticals, not things either man actually experienced. Thus, for Chesterton, the lived experience of real soldiers surpasses their ideas.

Are there any modern essayists on the level of Chesterton, Orwell, etc.? Is there even any maintenance of the essay as a literary form?

>>9924343
I actually brought it up a few dozen Nick Land threads ago. It's an essay about GK Chesterton's conception of liberty. I actually wrote it at the request of /lit/'s new favorite magazine, Jacobite, but when it was done they rejected it. So I tried to find a home for it for a while, and ended up getting it accepted by a journal of Catholic scholarship called the St. Austin Review. They're publishing a Chesterton-themed issue some time in the next year, and they want my essay to be in it. It is, indeed, pretty cool. I adore Chesterton, so getting an essay on him published in a journal of Catholic letters is a dream come true.

>>9789309
Not him, but I feel like the very idea of the Logos, the Word, puts too great a limit upon God, even God in the human incarnation of Jesus. The beginning of John's Gospel seems to me an attempt by a human being to express something beyond him, an attempt by a finite being to encompass the infinite. Naturally, it's bound to fail, and so John collapses into paradoxes, paradoxes about the Word being with God and also being God--word games and such. But I think this is all by design. I think, incidentally, this is why Chesterton likes paradoxes so much, and talks about them so much. I think John and Chesterton both hit on something fundamental about humans relating to God. Everything about us as humans is encompassed by God, yet God exceeds our limits. So our language breaks down when trying to adequately discuss and describe him. This is part of the power of mysticism, it offers an avenue of communication with the divine that succeeds where language fails. But language's attempts to encompass God seem to arrive at paradox because it's a way of expressing the limitless within language's limitations. Through the tangled mess of the paradox we perceive the Thing that transcends category and classification.

Based Gilbert, punker of prats and slayer of pseuds.

>>9517524
Distributism, of course.

Undoubtedly Chesterton. Arguably more right-wing than Evola, given how much he loved the Church and the Middle Ages. And of course unlike Evola he wasn't painfully edgy.

CHESTERTON

Apologies to any triggered /fit/izens

>the last century

Do you mean of the entire 20th Century?

>>9000952
>awful arguments

You're just mad that he has a powerful bullshit detector and things YOUR favorite "philosopher" is nothing but a sophist.

When did you realize that the next cultural movement will be backward-looking and a "return to tradition," /lit/?

There is, logically, nowhere to go after postmodernism. What comes after what comes after modernism? There is nowhere forward to move now, except right into a wall. The only direction to go is backward.

>>8786118
So, then, why does Chesterton like Shakespeare?

>>8738301
Only correct answer. Perhaps the most based writer of the last 100 years.

OP here, doing a little more research just deepens the mystery. Joyce was an on-again, off-again friend of TS Eliot, whom he met when Eliot visited Paris in 1920. Eliot, meanwhile, lived in London, and while there he also butted heads with Chesterton quite a bit. However, when Eliot himself converted to Christianity in 1929, he and Chesterton mended fences, and thenceforth Chesterton was a regular contributor to the Criterion, Eliot's quarterly magazine.

With Eliot to link them, it seems ridiculous that Joyce wouldn't have had occasion to think about Chesterton. Yet I still can't find any commentary on him from Joyce. I'll keep looking.