The Everlasting Man

“The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.”

Chesterton proposes to demonstrate the logic and rationality of his position by looking at the issue from a completely detached and extrinsic perspective. Here he points out that the worst kind critics think they understand but are only vaguely aware of certain notions—critics who think that they’ve heard the story before, while not knowing enough to know that they actually do not know anything at all.

“It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man.”

The gap between human beings and the other animals is an infinite chasm, not because human beings are not animals—which they are—but because they are an altogether different kind of animal. This can be deduced by looking at something only humans do: creating art. No other creature fashions works of art to make meaning and purpose, and often simply for the joy of the thing.

“Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God.”

A fundamental principle in classical philosophy—and in the Catholic tradition that adopted it—is that the human person is a potentially infinite creature because of the capacity of the mind, which is capable of reflecting and containing the mysteries of the universe. Combined with the capacity for love and interpersonal communion, this makes a human the image of God in the created world.