When analyzing Chesterton’s humor, the question must be asked, ‘Is this just flippancy?’ Chesterton himself said that he despised flippancy, so we can deduce that he certainly did not intend his humor to be flippant. But to form a balanced opinion, it is necessary to also consult other sources. C. S. Lewis also despised flippancy, and in his discussion of Chesterton’s humor, he maintains that it was neither flippancy, nor “’jokes’ inbedded in the page like currants in a cake… but the humor which is not in any way separable from the argument but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the ‘bloom’ on dialectic itself.” Chesterton did not add humor to his writing purely for the sake of being funny or for any other reason except that he considered it the best vehicle for the truths he was presenting. In fact, it was often a necessary part of his argument. Lewis continues his discussion of Chesterton: “The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly.”
One of the …show more content…
He was convinced that paradox was the root of all truth. The root of his own heart, life, and thinking, the root beneath that towering redwood called truth, was the God-man Jesus Christ: the greatest paradox of all. “[Chesterton] wrote in paradoxes because he thought that the ultimate nature of truth lay in paradoxes, and above all in the supreme Christian paradox by which the Creator of the Universe was a little baby, lying in a manger, the child of a human mother. ‘Credo quie impossibile.’” Kenner, in his book Paradox in Chesterton, states that “the majority of [Chesterton’s] multitudinous demonstrations of the paradoxical are traceable to his perception of the root paradox at the heart of the cosmos: the God who died.” Chesterton not only used paradox because he thought it true, but as a nod to the greatest Truth of
One of the …show more content…
He was convinced that paradox was the root of all truth. The root of his own heart, life, and thinking, the root beneath that towering redwood called truth, was the God-man Jesus Christ: the greatest paradox of all. “[Chesterton] wrote in paradoxes because he thought that the ultimate nature of truth lay in paradoxes, and above all in the supreme Christian paradox by which the Creator of the Universe was a little baby, lying in a manger, the child of a human mother. ‘Credo quie impossibile.’” Kenner, in his book Paradox in Chesterton, states that “the majority of [Chesterton’s] multitudinous demonstrations of the paradoxical are traceable to his perception of the root paradox at the heart of the cosmos: the God who died.” Chesterton not only used paradox because he thought it true, but as a nod to the greatest Truth of