Book Quotes: GKC on Science and History

I just finished G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, which I've been meaning to read for a long time. It's a response to H.G. Wells's own science-based history of the universe and man. G.K. Chesterton aims to show how man stands out among nature and how Christ stands out among religions. Some good quotes in there, and instead of a review I just went through the trouble of typing them all out (hoping some of the wit will rub off through the keyboard), and so here's my greatest hits:

“I do not believe in dwelling on the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch. 1

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“Nobody can imagine how nothing can turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even if you only mean ‘In the beginning an unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.’” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch. 1

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“The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch. 1

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“For clothes are literally vestments and man wears them because he is a priest.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch. 1

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“Among the more ignorant of the enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests had obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a debate that I was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient priest probably resisted the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in reply, that it was far more likely that the ancient priest made the discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient priest had a great deal to do with the discovery of the art of writing. It is obvious enough in the fact that the very work hieroglyphic is akin to the word hierarchy.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch. 1

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“Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a ‘type,’ in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch.4 p. 230

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“Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens; so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The test therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch.4 p. 237

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“The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch.5 p. 243

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“I mean the primary and overpowering yet palpable impression that the universe after all has one origin and one aim; and because it has an aim must have an author. … Atheism only became possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavored to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men’s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch. 6 p. 294-5.

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“It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch. 7 p. 302.

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“We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos; that it was larger than the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than creation; as creation had been before Christ. It included things that had not been there; it also included the things that had been there.” – GKC Everlasting Man Ch. 7 p. 309.