The Work
The Everlasting Man was published in 1925 by Hodder and Stoughton (London) and Dodd, Mead (New York). G.K. Chesterton wrote it as a direct response to H.G. Wells's The Outline of History (1920), which presented human history as a continuous evolutionary progress from primitive cave-dwellers to modern liberal democracy, with Christianity as one phase in a generally upward religious development. Chesterton's counter-narrative divides into two parts: "The Creature Called Man" (arguing that humanity is categorically different from animals -- neither a more developed animal nor a failed god) and "The Man Called Christ" (arguing that Jesus Christ is categorically different from all other religious teachers and founders). The book is approximately 280 pages. C.S. Lewis credited it as the most decisive single influence in his conversion from atheism to Christianity.
Biblical Engagement
Genesis 1:27 ("So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them") is the theological ground for Chesterton's central argument in Part One. Against evolutionary naturalism, which sees humanity as a more complex animal, Chesterton argues that the cave paintings of Lascaux -- the earliest human art, depicting bison and horses and hunters with extraordinary vitality -- represent a qualitative break in the history of life on earth. The cave painter is not a clever animal making marks; he is a being made in the image of a creating God, expressing an impulse toward beauty and meaning that has no natural explanation.
John 1:14 ("And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth") is the text Chesterton uses to frame the Incarnation as the unique, scandalous, categorically unprecedented event of Part Two. Against the comparative religion school's reduction of Christianity to one myth among many (the dying-and-rising god pattern), Chesterton argues that the Incarnation of the eternal Word in the specific person of Jesus of Nazareth is not a mythological pattern but a historical event -- "the myth became fact," as C.S. Lewis would later put it, under Chesterton's influence.
Matthew 16:16 ("Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God") is the confession that Chesterton treats as the structural pivot of history. His argument is that no comparative religious analysis can explain the originality of this claim: Buddha did not claim to be divine, Mohammed did not claim to be divine, the founders of other religions did not make the specific, historical claim that Jesus made. The particularity and uniqueness of the Incarnation -- not a general divine influence but God in this person, at this time, in this place -- is Chesterton's central apologetic point.
Isaiah 9:6 ("For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace") is one of the prophetic texts Chesterton uses to show that the claim of divine Sonship did not originate with the disciples but was anticipated in the prophetic tradition. The scandal of the Incarnation was not a surprise to those who had read Isaiah; it was a surprise to those who had not.
Author and Context
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was born in Kensington, London. He studied at the Slade School of Art and began his career as a journalist, literary critic, and essayist. His conversion to Anglicanism in the early 1900s (described in Orthodoxy, 1908) and his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922 (the year after The Everlasting Man's narrative is set) shaped his apologetic career. He was prolific to an extraordinary degree: journalist, novelist (the Father Brown detective stories), poet, playwright, literary critic (studies of Dickens, Blake, Browning), social critic, and theologian.
The Everlasting Man was written three years after Chesterton's reception into the Catholic Church. It is his most sustained apologetic work -- more rigorously argued and less witty than Orthodoxy -- and reflects his engagement with the comparative religion scholarship of his day, including James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) and the evolutionary humanism of Wells.
C.S. Lewis read The Everlasting Man in 1925, while he was an atheist, and was deeply disturbed by it. He later wrote in Surprised by Joy (1955): "In the Trinity term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." He credited The Everlasting Man as having done more than any other single text to prepare his mind for this conversion.
Critical Reception
The book was reviewed enthusiastically by Catholic publications and with mixed appreciation by secular reviewers. Its argument was recognized as original and penetrating, and its prose style -- paradoxical, allusive, energetic -- as characteristically Chestertonian. Contemporary scholars of apologetics and religious history have found the book both intellectually stimulating and historically problematic (Chesterton's account of primitive religion draws on nineteenth-century anthropology that is now contested).
Theological Significance
Chesterton's central contribution is the argument for the uniqueness and the factual character of the Incarnation. Against both the liberal Protestant reduction of Jesus to a moral teacher and the comparative religion school's reduction of Christianity to a mythological pattern, Chesterton insists on the historical particularity of the Incarnation. This argument anticipates C.S. Lewis's famous "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" trilemma and Tolkien's concept of the Incarnation as "myth become fact."
Legacy
The Everlasting Man is one of the most intellectually powerful works of Christian apologetics ever written. Its influence on the twentieth-century Catholic literary and intellectual revival is immeasurable. Through C.S. Lewis -- who called it the greatest popular apologetics of the century -- its arguments entered the evangelical Protestant tradition, where they continue to circulate through Lewis's own writings.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Genesis 1:26-28 (the image of God in humanity), John 1:1-18 (the Logos and the Incarnation), Matthew 16:13-20 (the confession of Peter), Isaiah 9:1-7 and 11:1-10 (the messianic prophecies), and Colossians 1:15-20 (the cosmic Christ).
Further Reading
- Ian Ker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (2011) -- the most thorough modern biography. - Ralph Wood, Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (2011) -- a theological study of Chesterton's intellectual contributions. - C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955) -- describes the direct influence of The Everlasting Man on Lewis's conversion.