The Everlasting Man

Chesterton finds important early Christian imagery of “the key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty” (425-26). As Christianity and the Catholic Church began to take shape and to spread, they overtook the great cosmopolitan cultures where they were “felt to be something new and strange” (430). Christianity’s intrinsic universality was all things to all people, “Roman and Greek and Jewish and African and Asiatic” (436), and it brought with it the twin poles of joy and asceticism.

The Christian philosophy was a middle ground between the fulfillment of all wishes and asceticism for asceticism’s sake—these were the paths that Christianity’s enemies traveled. Early Church heresies were extremes that “in one form or another regarded the creation of the world as the work of an evil spirit” (445). The Church had to battle pessimism and despair, and “the primitive Catholics were especially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy” (447). If Christianity had ever been anything like its critics or its uninformed evaluators asserted, it should have been swept up and lost to history quite some time ago.