The Everlasting Man

Introduction

The Everlasting Man is a work of philosophical history, written by G. K. Chesterton in 1925. In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton seeks to demonstrate the providential ordering of history and the uniqueness of human beings in general and of the person of Jesus Christ in particular. Ever since its publication, the book has been widely influential, even contributing to the intellectual conversion of C. S. Lewis, who called it the best popular apologetic he knew.

A work of Christian apologetics, the book is in part a response to H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History, which argues that human beings are simply more advanced animals, and that Jesus Christ was one of the more remarkable of these animals. Chesterton, however, is at pains to demonstrate that this is not the case—for Chesterton, human beings are different not in degree, but in kind; he sees Jesus Christ as not a mere human being, but the divinity incarnate, a true cosmic anomaly. By tracing historical records left by various human civilizations, Chesterton shows that human beings have been civilized from the very beginning. In contrast to the assertions made by Wells and most modern interpreters of history, Chesterton posits that it is just as likely that human beings have been devolving into greater depravity, rather than that evolving and becoming ever more intelligent and enlightened. Thus, it makes no sense to either consider humanity just another species, or to make a similar argument about Jesus Christ.

This study guide was written using the Kindle version of the Angelico Press reprint edition of 2013.

Summary

Chesterton sets out “to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things” (21). To this end, the book is composed in two major sections: “a sketch of the main adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen,” and “a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming Christian” (11).

Artwork preserved on ancient stone walls demonstrates that human beings are alone in the animal world concerned with creating art. We can conjecture about primitive people and civilizations, yet there are no records of human beings in any stage of existence where they were not civilized. History, then, tells us that human beings have always been more or less the same, pointing to a static human nature which is present in each human who has ever lived.

Although the concept and practice of religion is near-universal, there is no parallel to the claims of Christianity. In other words, although there have long been organized religion, various beliefs in gods, sacrifices, and moral codes, the Christian claim is unique. This unique character of Christianity makes the field of comparative religion ultimately of little to no value. While humanity has always felt the call of the transcendent, monotheism—specifically Christian monotheism—is novel and historically epochal.

The creation of mythology was a search for the truth about nature and human beings, making it rather like philosophy. However, it was only with the beginning of the Christian church and doctrine that the realms of religion and philosophy were finally united. Eventually, the paganism in which this mythology flourished outgrew its usefulness in a decadent age that had desensitized itself to wonder and truthfulness, and it was into this world that Jesus of Nazareth was born.

With the advent of Christ, all mythology was made obsolete, for the truth after which it sought had now emerged. The Catholic creed made the making of myths irrelevant, since it took up into itself all that was true, and added to it the rest of revealed truth that it could not generate on its own. Paramount to this truth-finding was the teaching of Jesus, which is as shocking now as it was then. The Jesus of the Gospels was no meek moralist, but a radical and complex bundle of paradoxes that set an ideal most difficult to live up to in any age.

The life of Christ proved to be the end of history as it had been. The Christian truth was the key that would “unlock the prison of the world” (425), taking all who would come with an open mind and an honest heart. Christianity affirmed humanity’s goodness within the world, contesting ideologies that saw creation as vile and wicked, and of no ultimate worth. This meant that reason could be united to faith, a novel concept for a world that saw them as occupying two distinct spheres.

The advent of Christ brought a new warmth to the cosmos, as the distant and transcendent God had broken into the timeline of history to take up a cross among the rank and file of men and women everywhere. This truth, too radical for some to believe, was the cornerstone of the Christian teaching that there was finally something over which to rejoice in the world, finally something to instill lasting hope in the human heart.