It's interesting that Chesterton seems to be something of a writer's writer. A lot of the great writers of the 20th Century held him in high esteem, especially his short stories, his novels, and his poetry. All the Inklings loved him, especially Lewis and Tolkien. Gene Wolfe loved him, too. Even Borges loved him.Have you found Chesterton to be a great writer, /lit/?
>>23329150Yeah, he’s very good
>>23329150He's more like a cosy indulgence for writers who tend to overemphasise his talent because they love indulging their enjoyment of him so much. But he's no Carlyle.
>>23329150None of the writers you listed are that great though. It's just a circlejerk of mediocrity.
>>23329150>ChestertonBased Catholic>LewisDecent Anglican>WolfeBased Catholic>Tolkien Based Catholic>Borgescringe agnostic
Luv Man Who Was ThursdayLuv Ballad of the White Hose'ate his damn apologeticsSimple as.
>>23329150>Chesterton>Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.
>>23329150>Lewis>C. S. Lewis: There are people in this world, if one may call them “people,” who still mention this swine in the same breath with Tolkien. Don’t do this. I don’t want to hurt you, but just DON’T DO IT. Tolkien’s accomplishment was best summed up by the comment that he “made himself the creative equivalent of a people.” That’s a bit modest, really, because Tolkien became several peoples, became the entire mind of Dark-Ages Europe. C. S. Lewis, who was an unworthy colleague and a treacherous friend of Tolkien’s, is Tolkien’s polar opposite in every way that matters. Tolkien was an actual English Catholic—born to it, doomed to it, unlike the poser Greene. Ever wonder why Gandalf’s named Gandalf, and why God(s) are not mentioned in Lord of the Rings? Tolkien had to be quiet. Tolkien was a man of honor, who married without love because he had made a promise; he and his wife stayed together in the grim Catholic way and raised five children. Tolkien was a true scholar, a preeminent Anglo-Saxonist and pan-European linguist. Lewis remained a little boy, a pompous little prig, all his life. He was a smug Belfast “Christian,” full of the proper hatred and sense of superiority; he lived at home until seduced by a middleaged groupie in late middle age, and when she died, discovered that he’d been wrong to tell everyone that God sent us pain for our own good. Having experienced actual pain for the first time at the age of sixty, this moralizing infant was vouchsafed the epiphany that pain HURTS. He was shocked. He felt that God needed to rethink the whole matter. And let’s not forget that dear old wardrobe, and Narnia. Narnia vs. Middle Earth. Gee, there’s a tough one! Narnia is one of the most sick, inept fantasies ever devised. It has the treacly tendentiousness of a fairytale for a sundayschool course, the sort of thing pedophile curates use to explain the Trinity to the kids they’re cuddling, making up cute animals while letting their hands stray southward. That’s where Narnia lies: Yon, southward! between the child’s legs and the curate’s twitchy fingers.
>>23329150He's hokum and likable. His prose is kind of like Mark Twain's but stylistically very English and less cynical in tone.
>>23329468I can find no actual source for this quote.
I'd join him for a drink, but wouldn't spend the weekend with him.
Has anyone here read The Man who was Thursday?
>>23329374Luv Manalive
>>23329150Wide boy
Father Brown is the comfiest shit
>>23329150>Have you found Chesterton to be a great writer, /lit/?More like a 'very fun to read' writer. His ideas are absolutely cancerous though.
>>23329922>His ideas are absolutely cancerous though.how come? what ideas?
>>23329554Yes it's my favorite of his fiction but I'm biased because that was one of the first serious book I read in English (ESL obviously) as a teenager because it was referenced and one of the basis for the story of the videogame Deus Ex. >>23329952Chesterton got plenty of hate from his trashing of most of what was fashionable in his lifetime, and sometimes today. He was strongly anti-socialist, anti-fascist, anti-feminist, anti-semitic (but pro-zionist to solve the JQ this way), anti-racist, anti-imperialism, anti-eugenics, etc. Of course he was right but he was (deliberately and playfully) making sure there was something to fume about for almost everyone.
>>23329150I love his writing style and I find him a very enjoyable readNapoleon of Notting Hill and the Man who was Thursday rank among my favourites and the others are really good too I think books like Heretics and Orthodoxy are worth rereading every couple of years to see how you'd approach his ideas this time around He doesn't really argue his case though, his approach is entirely intuitive and rhetorical
>>23329468I am not even a Lewis fan, that is remarkably unfair and low. It is also ignorant. His mother died when he was nine years old. That boy had a very hard childhood.
>>23330319>He was strongly anti-socialist, anti-fascist, anti-feminist, anti-semitic (but pro-zionist to solve the JQ this way), anti-racist, anti-imperialism, anti-eugenics, etc.Holy shit he's just like me fr
>>23330335A special snowflake?
>>23329554I know someone who claims to have read it but I think he lied
>>23330329His dad was a jerk too. At least after the mom died.
>>23330329Accusing anyone that actually went to WWI trench warfare of not knowing hardship is already strange.
>>23329554I have. It's fantastic, gripping yet beautiful.
>>23329374What about the Napoleon of Notting Hill?
>>23332131>>23330319Would I like it if I love surreal novels? I have a huge backlog, but if it's a surreal classic, I'll read it next week
>>23330335He was also anti-white, just like you.
>>23329150Who is this fat wizard?
>>23332279>anti-racist>"He was also anti-white"You perpetual victim beta whites are so low IQ.
>>23329330>t. tribalist retard
>>23332279I'm sure someone that wanted even Scotland to be independent so that everyone lived among their own would have been thrilled by the jeet invasion just because he mocked the supremacists of a sub-haplotype and third decimal of cranial index.
I tried reading some of his christia works and they were extremely tedious and dry
>>23329330Why is this board so obsessed with catholicism
>>23330319>because it was referenced and one of the basis for the story of the videogame Deus Ex.samei wonder how many people read this book because of it
>>23332584>Why is this board so obsessed with the institution set up by the incarnate resurrected God to be official agents of His will on Earth?I don't understand the question. This board is obsessed with barely-readable self indulgent monstrosities by Irish fart-sniffers and baked Californian paranoids, and while you can say a lot of bad and true things about the Catholic church, this is something quite distinct.
>>23333857Jesus did not establish the church and he would spit on Paul if he still walked this earth. And Paul would spit on you for going to bat for a state theocracy that murdered and ate the church he established.
>>23333863[Citation needed]If any of this were true, it would seem to be within God's power to correct it. But He didn't, and in fact the Church has thrived, against all odds, almost as if it had divine favor (despite the embarrassing fallibility of most of its members, as Jesus also understood when he handed the keys to Peter). Not a Catholic or even a Christian, but their claims are a lot more supportable than 4chan scholar retconning.
>>23333857Well if that were true /lit/ would be discussing the works of Martin Luther far more than all things Catholic
>>23333897you are unironically asleep at the wheel
>>23333912Why? Luther isn't as smart as Aquinas, and Lutheranism is not politically relevant.>>23333920I unironically have no idea what this means, so maybe you are right.
>>23333970>Luther isn't as smart as Aquinas, and Lutheranism is not politically relevant.It's really amazing how succinctly this post demonstrates the problem with Catholicism.
>>23333970youre like 100 years out of date regarding christian theologan studies. which is fair but generally you shouldnt spout 100 year old data points period. i mean for fucka sake the dead sea scrolls were only discovered 50 years ago.we know a lot more about the bible now than we ever have before, and the forming consensus is that the romans did so much more damage to christianity than anyone could have ever thought possible.
>>23334011What does "Christian theological studies" have to do with God's will? I think it's all made up, but if I did accept that God made a revelation and Paul or whoever ruined it, then it's hard to see why God wouldn't fix it. Or if he didn't "fix" it, isn't it definitionally just another manifestation of His will?Biblical scholarship is interesting, and probably a lot of it is true, but all this commentary exists in some sort of shadow world between belief and scepticism. I'm atheist, so the natural reading is some guys said some stuff 2000 years ago and it somehow blew up, like the other world religions presumably did. The believer reading is equally clear, if you accept their priors - things happen because God wills it, or at least allows it. "Jesus was really God but then Paul and the Church ruined it and God was too busy to notice," is just incoherent, which is why it convinced nobody except internet teens.
>>23334011ESL, extremely confused (what you are talking about would be church history which is not "theologan studies" [sic]), and promoting schizo theories (I'm waiting for you to mention the hidden church). Bonus for hyping things by referencing the Dead Sea Scrolls, not rigorously without interest to minor aspects of church history (and even then with careful skepticism on how you can read things into a micro-sect of Jews that didn't convert to Christianity) but it is comical to present them as some bombshell rewriting things like the last wave of pics of Hunter Biden fucking lolis is changing politics forever.
>>23334085>some micro-sect of jews that didnt convert to christianitythats not what the dead sea scrolls are, in any remote sensechurch history is theology as it relates to christs teachings that explicitly condemn the institution of a church>>23334053>What does "Christian theological studies" have to do with God's will?see above. we have jesus' words, recorded post mortem as they are. so we know that christians SHOULD be against the state church according to their theology.
>>23334158>we have jesus' words, recorded post mortem as they areWe have attestations of Jesus' words (4 'canonical' versions along with endless 'noncanonical' ones - there is no reason for scholars to accept the Orthodox canon as more "historical" than apocrypha. These sources disagree. These sources also attest to things happening that either did not happen (the Sun going dark) or seem highly improbable from the view of standard historiography (all the miracles). And the authorship of any of these is highly uncertain. So no, we do not "know" anything about what Jesus did, and even the canonical view is that there is some uncertainty and disagreement - which is why there are 4 gospels.I don't take any position about the factual accuracy of the Catholic interpretation of Matthew 16, as I think the Bible is largely mythology - but it's not unreasonable if you believe the text is inspired. Or, you could interpret it otherwise. But they've been autistically arguing about this for 2000 years, so on their own terms the arguments are pretty solid, and unlikely to find a definitive deboonking from online teenagers.
>>23334270>there is no reason for scholars to accept the Orthodox canon as more "historical" than apocryphaThere really is. I think you mean that the lists of canon are not the argument itself, but no one even close to the mainstream is taking into account the apocryphal gospels when doing their more or less weirdo reconstructions anymore. At most there are a few (and I mean five) exact sentences attributed to Jesus not present in the canonical gospels that are found spread out in patristic writings and probably legitimate remnants of oral teachings that didn't make it to the canonical texts.
>>23334291It depends. From a historiographical view - how do we assess what happened here - they are all pretty dubious. If your specific interest is reconstructing what the group that would eventually define orthodoxy believed, then of course you want to focus on those texts which would become canon (although there are detectable non-canon influences even here).>At most there are a few (and I mean five) exact sentences attributed to Jesus not present in the canonical gospels that are found spread out in patristic writings and probably legitimate remnants of oral teachings that didn't make it to the canonical textsBut I'm not talking about patristic writing, which is not relevant to historical reconstruction of the historical Jesus (unless you already believe they are divinely inspired, but that isn't really history in the usual sense). Nag Hammadi is overflowing with alternative gospels (and we don't know how widespread or influencial any of them were). These people lost the political and theological argument, but that does not imply, from a historical point of view, that their documents are inferior or deboonked (except that some of them are quite wacky with miracles, although all the gospels have this issue to some degree).
>>23334270>there is no reason for scholars to accept the Orthodox canon as more "historical" than apocryphaI think it only makes sense that the contemporaries of Jesus and the people immediately acquainted with the followers He knew in person would have a better grasp on what writings are legitimate and not. The compilers of Scripture were taking it directly from the horses mouth. They were not trying to reconstruct it as we do today
>>23334728you do realize that the scriptures were compiled centuries after the life and times of the disciples, let alone the life and times of the man himself right? you know that... right?the apocrypha are literally closer to those immediately aquanted with jesus and the disciples than the compiled scriptures are.they were, as a matter of fact, trying to reconstruct it as we do today.
He has a spirit of meanness and crueltyI can imagine him giving a mean smirk at the sight of someone tripping over and hurting themselves because they were in a rush
>>23332503anti-whites are very ignorant
>>23335826The fallacy in your reasoning is that you present Christianity as some unformed and disorganized practice until the 4th century. The pre Constantine Church knew what was legitimate and not, which was the basis on which they were able to canonize scripture
>>23335872we know for a fact that christianity was a decentralized practise until the 4th century. this is not up for debate, pre state churches were localized communal affairs.
>>23335881and there were disagreements between them about what was canonical. this is also a fact.
>>23335881Decentralized doesn't mean inconsistent. We know from Paul's writings that there was a lot of travel and contact between all the churches of the different cities. You're making the argument that there was no such thing as Christianity until Constantine which is just absurd and ahistorical.
>>23335891>we know from pauls writingsthis is what im talking about, youre operating on outdated information. we know that we dont have any of pauls writings.
chesterton is in hell because of his gluttony
>>23335898Now this is advanced retardation. Always amazes me that contemporary scholarship is wrong about everything
>>23335912>no argumentconcession accepted
>>23335913You didn't make an argument either. Merely an unproven assertion. I accept your non argument.
>>23335918>n- no u!cope. i made an argument, you refused to engage it.
>>23335918>>23335938ngl i'm getting major gay vibes out of both of you
>>23335938No, you made an assertion, not an argument. There was nothing to engage with.
>>23335949wrong, stop pretending to be stupid.
>>23329330Borges was not an agnostic papi
>>23335975Right. Stop pretending to be smart.
>>23335985>still no argumenti already accepted your concession. all youre doing now is coping.
>>23332173>>23329554I honestly think it's an entirely different idea of surrealism than, say, Breton was thinking of. But it's much more of the idea of Hysterical Realism that Anglos developed the genre into. Lots of whacky happenings. I think it's a charming book but not all that great, a bit exhausting by the 2/3rds mark, and honestly it felt like we were being hurried from scene to scene throughout the work, which just felt odd to me. It also lingered in places. Really, the lingering was something I really stuck on. People complain about books that spend a lot of time on describing the set where action is to take place, but less is written on being made to exist in a scene that is by all laws of story-energy completely finished, thread's spun.
>>23329330A "decent anglican" is a contradiction in terms.
>>23329464>>23329468who dis?
>>23329150I've seen multiple people say this but I find it perfectly sums up my opinions of Chesterton. He is the dumb person's idea of a smart person. He is the Bernard Russell of Catholics in which he says a bunch of shitty self serving quips which makes him sound smart to people who have no idea what they're talking about. If you're looking for catholic authors, Chesterton is outclassed in every way by Belloc, Bernanos, and Bloy. He was liked by authors I do admire like George Bernard Shaw and T.S. Eliot but I can't help by find him to be nothing but mediocre. The fact that people actually tried to label him a successor to Carlyle and Ruskin is unbelievably braindead and I think even those who admire Chesterton on here would agree as much.
>>23336154Chesterton is not of the uppermost first tier of thinkers but is certainly better than that retard Carlyle.
>>23329150I had read two of his short murder mysteries, I liked the howdunnit, prose, whodunnit, but sheer idiotism of motive straight up killed all interest I held toward reading more.
>>23332142Yes, I quite liked this one as well.
>>23336650Chesterton thought he was a genius.>The profound security of Carlyle's sense of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets—humour. A man must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half-converted Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke.
>>23336650Here's your (you)
>>23335988I already conceded that you offered me your concession.
>>23336154>the dumb person's idea of a smart person>Bernard RussellJUST
>>23329309Their era was a golden age compared to post-war writing.
>>23329468Sauce? Date Anything at all?
>>23329150>ctrl + f "unit">0 resultsin awe
>>23329468Is he asserting what I think he's asserting...
>>23329150Any author /lit/ hates for ideological or religious reasons tends to be pretty good.
>>23338263Dr Seuss?
>>23336948>His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity.This fat fuck is the joke.
>>23329161>Carlylewhere do i begin with this gentleman? thanks
>>23338628>Sartor Resartus>Past and Present>On Heroes>French Revolution>Latter-Day PamphletsHope you enjoy
>>23333299I'm a catholic so of course I'd heard of Chesterton but I never got round to reading him until Deus ex. The excerpts sprinkled through the game were more than enough to get me interested and the context really sold me on him.
