Dale Ahlquist: "G.K. Chesterton and The Perils of Being a Complete Thinker"

When you have an answer for everything, it seems that no one wants to talk to you anymore. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a nice guy. When the prevailing philosophy is that truth is relative or largely irrelevant or basically unknowable or strictly personal, in other words, when our only certainty is our uncertainty, there is nothing more irritating than some one who comes along and smashes such non-conclusive conclusions. There is nothing more unsettling than someone who has settled things. The most unwelcome person on a college campus today is someone who can argue persuasively that there is a truth that is absolute, all-important, accessible, and universal. Which explains why G.K. Chesterton is not taught or studied in our universities.

Unless, of course, it is exactly the other way round. Read on by clicking title of this post, anyway.

“The world is living off its Catholic capital,” says Chesterton. The university itself is a Catholic invention. So are hospitals. So are Psychiatrists (Chesterton describes Psychiatry as “confession without absolution.”).

Dahlquist got Chesterton wrong here. He was not accusing the Catholic Church of inventing the intrusive institution usually referred to as psychiatry. But, considering Torquemada, maybe he should have. And chosen Greek Orthodoxy rather than Roman Catholicism.