I am very pleased to announce the release of my new book: The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton (Cascade, 2025). As I write this, the book is available for order directly from the publisher but it’ll take a few weeks before it gets to other booksellers. You can read the blurb, pre-publication praise, and the cover at my publisher’s website to see if you want to get a copy. It’s a scholarly book but I hope it’s still engaging, interesting, and meditative; and that it opens new avenues of thought for you. That said, for a slightly more tangible sense of what I explore in the book, below I have included the paper I presented at the Chesterton: Polymath conference at the Notre Dame London Global Gateway, boster by The University of Notre Dame (London), in late October of 2022.
Before we get to the paper, there’s something else. As luck would have it, an article I wrote recently on Chesterton was published—yes, on the same day that my new book was released!—in the open-access journal Religions 2025, 16(3), 280; in the Catholic Theologies of Culture special issue edited by Prof. Dr. Jacob Phillips. It offers a Chestertonian response to the current crisis of meaning. You can read and/or download it here.
G. K. Chesterton made some remarkable predictions about the future, and he has often been impressively right.1 Briefly, here, I want to suggest something about how and why he was able to be so prescient.2 To begin with, if counterintuitively, I should clarify that Chesterton was no historicist.3 He denied that we can know the “inner meaning” of the historical process,4 and insisted that history, as “the most human of all sciences,”5 should remain an exploration of humanity and not of a dead machine with human parts.
History doesn’t tend in any single direction, he says, whether towards progress or decline. History wobbles.6 He was therefore unimpressed by “Teutonic” theories of history.7 They substituted “an idea of fatalistic alteration for the medieval freedom of the soul seeking truth.”8 Any “materialist theory of history” is folly at best and an excuse for violence at worst.9 In fact, Chesterton would have been happy for many of his predictions to remain unfulfilled. “Like all healthy-minded prophets,” he writes, “I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in the hope that my prophecy may not come true.”10 Some things may be likely but no anticipated future is inevitable. Prophecy, for Chesterton, therefore has a deeper meaning than mere predictive accuracy. It is more like a game or a lark—something done for fun—than a science.
In a larkish spirit, in 1930, Chesterton claimed that high heels would likely get out of hand in the twenty-first century. “A fashionable person in the twenty-first century,” he said, “may end up in shoes with such high heels that he (or, rather, she) practically cannot walk at all.”11 Such a fashionable person, “may carry the same tendency so far as to walk on stilts, or to be unable to walk on stilts.”12 Well, in 2004, the Guinness Book of World Records declared twenty-inch high-heeled shoes to be the tallest commercially available shoes in the world, and in 2011 Lady Gaga wore similarly stupid shoes that made it nearly impossible for her to stand or walk. In predicting this absurd conversion of shoes into a personal Tower of Babel, was Chesterton not simply adopting the formula of so many historicist speculators of his time, who, as he noted, would see something going on and then declare that more of that thing was likely to happen in future?13 Thankfully, the answer is no.
While considering this possibility in future footwear, Chesterton reveals something of his not-so-methodical method of prediction. He suggests that one can easily imagine shoes becoming less practical because of a common feature of the modern world: people tend to neglect “the sacred duty of Thinking About Boots.”14 He notices this not by taking the trend as a rule, as his contemporaries did, but by taking it as a violation of a rule. Practically and metaphysically speaking, ‘Thinking About Boots’ would mean walking “backwards in your moral and philosophical boots till you find the ancient archetypal boots from which all boots have come.”15 In other words, Chesterton’s primary way of considering the future was to fix his attention on formal causality.
In his article Formal Causality in Chesterton, Marshall McLuhan aims only to “illustrate” Chesterton’s “concern with formal causality,”16 which can be symbolised by ‘Thinking About Boots.’ McLuhan’s article is brief and haphazard and it doesn’t propose to explain Chesterton’s prescience. Also, we should not assume that McLuhan has a strictly Aristotelian or Thomistic sense of the formal cause in mind, although he draws on their work. Typically, formal cause implies the essence of any object—its design or blueprint. McLuhan expands the idea to indicate how things are understood within a dynamic world of media and mediations, ultimately implying the world from which we interpret everything. Causes and effects are not divorced from our awareness. As Chesterton says, “the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes.” Therefore, “action and reaction” can “occur simultaneously” in the mind, and “the cause” can “be found after the effect.”17
One way of understanding the formal cause in Chesterton is by his use of the “photographic negative” metaphor in discussing the political concerns that led up to the Second World War.18 For Chesterton, if you want to understand anything—whether fashion, fanaticism, or Fascism—the last thing you should do is to look at the thing itself. The “right way to understand Fascism,” Chesterton says, “is not to look at the Fascists.”19 We should look at the photographic negative, so to speak, perhaps even from the photographic negative. The “figures that actually take the stage” are inadequate for perceiving rightly.20 The ground is what we should be after. This ground is not easy to find because it is invisible.
The formal cause is always hidden. It is perceptual and so never fully graspable in conceptual terms. We are reminded of this in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, when Gabriel Syme announces that the whole problem with trying to understand things is that we always see the back of them and never the front.21 By the way, Sunday, in that novel, is the formal cause—perceived differently by each character and by each of us.22 Similarly, Innocent Smith is the formal cause in Manalive and Gabriel Gale is the formal cause in The Poet and the Lunatics. Perhaps McLuhan was right to regard Chesterton’s preoccupation with formal causality as exasperating.
The essential nonobviousness of the formal cause is the reason “the world is in a permanent danger of being misjudged.”23 What we need, Chesterton proposes, is a telescope of sorts through which we can view the world we are in. After all, for “the mind and the eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis.”24We undervalue and forget our environment—and, here, environment is an analogy for the formal cause. “This is the great fall,” Chesterton writes. It is “the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real [spiritual] fall of Adam …”.25 One consequence of this fall, this drift from perceptual clarity, is that we end up in a state of alienation from the world we live in, caught up in appearances while oblivious to disappearances.26 “It is a strange thing,” says Chesterton, “that many truly spiritual men … have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.”27
The invisibility of the environment as such is no new problem. What sustains us is largely unknown to us; it is too close to be seen. To make matters trickier, we tend to arrange the world so that we don’t have to experience it.28 And there is no way to gain a completely transcendent, objective perspective on the formal cause. Such a perspective would be undesirable, I’d say, since it would reduce being to representation—a mere play of signs—rather than providing a deeper contact with reality.
So how can we get a better sense of this lost Eden and sunken Atlantis we live in? How might we build a telescope for perceiving the formal cause? I suspect Chesterton is always busy with this in all his work. He builds a sense of an archetypal environment against which we can contrast the world we live in and so also better interpret it. He inhabits paradox, a persistent between, to be true to the twofold call of being he identifies in Orthodoxy, namely, the call for adventure and homecoming.29 In being attentive to this ‘between’, we can train our perception to be aware of the patterns in reality, and especially to the dynamic relation between ourselves and the world. We can therefore also better notice how such patterns are distorted.
Chesterton trusts analogy to help him to gather a feeling for the formal cause. As Hugh Kenner notes, Chesterton already has an intuition of being, and especially an intuition of being as analogical.30 But thinking is also analogical. Chesterton’s concern with analogy is less about abstracting or judging reason than it is about retaining a sense of the intuitive—a sense of skylarking, which I get to later. Analogy guides our awareness of the world without having us merely split it into constituent parts or reduce it in any way. Chesterton allows reality to show itself as itself through our natural affinity with analogy. Perhaps the most important expression of this is in his use of parallelism. Hillaire Belloc contends that “parallelism was the weapon peculiar to Chesterton’s genius.” His “unique, his capital, genius for illustration by parallel, by example” is “his peculiar mark.”31 By definition, parallelism refers to successive verbal constructions that connect meaning through an echo of form. This may involve an echo of grammatical structure, sound, or metre. But Chestertonian parallelism is concerned with analogical resonances in meaning. Belloc defines his unique brand of parallelism as “the illustration of some unperceived truth by its exact consonance with the reflection of a truth already known and perceived.”32
This is particularly evident in a series of Chesterton’s articles published in Vanity Fair between 1920 and 1921, where he analyses social issues and proposes a way forward for what he calls A New Renascence. The subtitle of the series is Thoughts on the Structure of the Future. The Vanity Fair articles offer a key to understanding Chesterton’s attunement to formal causality in general, especially in connection with prediction. However, he warns against an excess of pattern recognition where “parallels of intellectual architecture elongate themselves into the endless perspectives of a nightmare.”33 In particular, I want to focus on the example of how Chesterton looks for the formal cause of American prohibitionism, meaning the lobby for the banning of alcohol, before speculating about the future.
He considers a mosaic of certain aspects of society, including the seriousness with which games are played, how sports are treated religiously, how “progress” often means a “stiffening of formalities,” how tools are used versus how toys are used, and how “scientific appliances” replicate a degraded awareness that badly affects human creativity.34 These are just a few examples but they build towards a sense of the formal cause. Chesterton sees the same pattern at play in plumbing, cinema, carpentry, and train driving. After juxtaposing one parallel after another of seemingly disconnected matters, he distils them into a single principle—into what McLuhan calls a ‘law of the situation.’ Chesterton states it in this way: “Something has come between the man and his materials, of which the effect here involved is this; that the same materials used for a serious purpose cannot be moulded to a more frivolous purpose.”35 By implication, the formal cause, the spirit of fun that gives rise to games, is overshadowed by a deformation, perhaps a deformed cause.
In other words, a specific way of mediating the world, connected with scientific thought and a largely univocal awareness, has replaced “amusing oneself” (a formal cause) with “being amused” (the deformation of that formal cause).36 People have moved away from larking about and cannot find their way back to it. Chesterton finds, even in something as seemingly trivial as the invention of modern cinema, a shift towards rendering people passive. Certain implications follow this. One is that people get too quickly squeezed into a mechanical mould, with the effect that their dignity is threatened. Chesterton can therefore suggest that it is not heavy drinking that is the chief cause of the loss of dignity—although it may make it both worse and more apparent. Within the frame of rendering people passive, even sitting in a cinema to be merely entertained may degrade people. No wonder they might resort to substance abuse. This treatment of alcohol as a medicine is an echo of a drift towards severity, which is why Chesterton suggests drinking only when “you do not need it.”37 By implication, offering prohibition as an answer to the abuse of alcoholic drinks amounts to being preoccupied with a symptom, which is an effect rather than a formal cause.
With this in mind, Chesterton writes, “The most startling and rending revolution in our politics would be the introduction of self-government. We are perhaps further from it than any human beings in history.”38 Prohibitionism, in his view, follows the same pattern as all the other things. It is a movement towards removing responsibility from people and downplaying their creativity. This contributes to making more heavy drinking likely. It takes a drift towards something negative and exacerbates it. “Governing ourselves,” Chesterton says, “would mean governing our own furniture, architecture and landscape; and what we eat and drink and wear.”39 Once he has perceived the form and the widespread corruption of this form, he can consider where this might lead in the future. What happens if transferring agency away from people towards the state becomes even more predominant in a society?
Here, Chestertonian parallelism becomes more speculative. He sees a connection between prohibitionism in America and the possibility of radical limitations being placed on speech itself, as well as the possibility of greater surveillance. If such governmental impositions are normalised, who is to stop authorities from telling people which medicines to take or what food to eat or even how to raise their children? As people begin to be more dependent and more powerless, their manipulability is likely to increase. Could other terrible addictions be encouraged within such an environment? Perhaps an addiction to cell phones or binge-watching.
Chesterton asks the reader to “picture the horrible pantomime that life would be, if we made a public rule” on a very “private matter.”40 “Suppose,” he wonders, “there were a Conversation Ministry as there is a Health Ministry in England to-day. Suppose the State sent out armies of eavesdroppers to hide behind doors and under tables; as it now sends out armies of inspectors to measure windows or analyse water.”41 These speculations probably appeared outlandish to his readers and yet these things don’t seem alien to us now. I should say, however, that Chesterton’s point in propounding parallelisms is not to be too serious about his predictions. This would only compound that awful ‘law of the situation’. Rather, as he suggests in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, he wants us to ‘Cheat the Prophet.’ He wants us to prove the law of the situation wrong, to keep to what is good by breaking with convention.
In playfully focusing on generating a sense of the photographic negative through analogy, we should not forget that Chesterton is, in fact, creating a possible future. The primary trouble with historicism is that it follows the modern trend of rendering people passive. It fails to encourage creativity and thus fails to encourage the “freedom of the soul seeking truth.”42 Chesterton proposes a reversal of this trend—a return to the formal cause. He proposes skylarking. The word means to pass the time by messing around in boisterous horseplay and having fun but for Chesterton it also means perceiving the world as a poet does. For Chesterton, we should adopt the mind of the poet who has “the power of enjoying enjoyable things,” such as skies and skylarks. This does not mean trying to enjoy fresh things with a stale mind but means enjoying even stale things with a fresh mind—with the mind of a child who never grows tired of doing things repeatedly.43 Chesterton notices the groove of modernity, its endless desire for novelties, and he sees that this is merely a figure. The ground to this figure, which is really an ungrounding, is a loss of real form—reflective, perhaps, of a desire to escape real form. It includes a loss of gratitude, a loss of virtue, and a loss of play.
When Chesterton predicts the future, therefore, he does so as an artist juggling extravagant possibilities. He does not marvel at all the wonders that could yet be as if novelty is enough to make anything genuinely praiseworthy. Rather, he does this to help us marvel at wonders that already are. The point of attending to formal causality, then, is not for the sake of predicting the future—although some prescience is a fascinating side-effect of this. The point is to recover that lost Eden and that sunken Atlantis in which we already live. Knowing how things will turn out makes prophecy a dull business, after all. What’s more interesting is that we can anticipate and also generate a new beginning—a “certain spirit” of “moral conditions” that might allow people to actually “enjoy themselves.”44 The point of endlessly revisiting formal cause is to ‘Think About Eden’ as we might ‘Think About Boots’—and then ask how, with that Eden and those proverbial Boots in mind, we might make this world just a little better than it currently is.
Does this mean that we can ever end up solving the formal cause? The answer is gloriously paradoxical. On the one hand, yes. We can discover the formal cause, as Gabriel Syme discovered Sunday and as Michael Moon and Arthur Inglewood proved the innocence of Innocent Smith. On the other hand, no. Arriving home does not spell the end of the journey any more than arriving at an answer spells the end of our questioning. For Chesterton, we ought to endlessly revisit the form of things, since it is only with “reference to form” that we can achieve anything like “reform.”45 It is only through encountering a thing repeatedly that we stand a chance of actually seeing it for the first time. It is only then that we can properly imagine a beginning.
And that is the soul of skylarking.
See, for example, Emile Cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet; Chesterton, Collected Works 5, 405; Aidan Mackey. 2008. G. K. Chesterton: A Prophet for the 21st Century. Virginia: IHS Press; Dale Ahlquist, Apostle of Common Sense, Ignatius, 173-177.
This is the larger subject of my book The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton (Cascade, 2025).
C. S. Lewis, ‘Historicism.’ Essays: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories. London: Harper Collins, 213.
Chesterton, The Daily News, 22 June 1912.
Chesterton, The Daily News, 5 October 1912.
Chesterton, Collected Works 3, 364. I wrote an article on this idea for Genealogies of Modernity. You can read that here.
Hegelian, Marxian, and Spenglerian.
Chesterton, Collected Works 4, 142.
Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 21 November 1925
Chesterton, Collected Works 5, 405.
Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 17 May 1930.
Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 17 May 1930.
See The Napoleon of Nottinghill.
Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 17 May 1930.
Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 17 May 1930.
Marshall McLuhan, Chesterton and Formal Cause. Media and Formal Cause, edited by Eric McLuhan. NeoPoeisis, 73.
The Victorian Age in Literature, Chapter 1. In para beginning “No in trying to describe …”
Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 16 June 1934.
Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 16 June 1934, emphasis added.
Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 16 June 1934.
Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. Ignatius, 247.
Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. Ignatius, 245. “Have you noticed an odd thing,” he [Syme] said, “about all your descriptions? Each man of you finds Sunday quite different, yet each man of you can only find one thing to compare him to the universe itself. Bull finds him like the earth in spring, Gogol like the sun at noonday. The Secretary is reminded of the shapeless protoplasm, and the Inspector of the carelessness of virgin forests. The Professor says he is like a changing landscape. This is queer, but it is queerer still that I also have had my odd notion about the President, and I also find that I think of Sunday as I think of the whole world.”
Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity, 3.
This is found somewhere in Chesterton’s Tremendous Trifles.
Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity, 3.
Chesterton mentions this idea in The Everlasting Man.
Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity, 2.
With apologies to Max Frisch, who in Homo Faber, attributes this to our technological developments. I take this, as Chesterton does, as a more fundamental problem linked to sin.
Chesterton, Collected Works 1, 212.
Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, 27.
Hillaire Belloc, On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters, 36.
Hillaire Belloc, On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters, 37.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 44.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 9.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 9-19.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 20.
Chesterton: “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.”
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 23.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 23-24.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 25-26.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 26.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 55.
See Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.
Chesterton, The New Renascence. Omo Press, 46-47
Chesterton, Collected Works 4, 229.