G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton was a journalist and novelist who invented the Father Brown mysteries, and a debater so genial that even his opponents adored him – an enormous man they called the laughing apologist. In Orthodoxy he tells how he set out to invent his own heresy and found he had invented Christianity, which had been standing for two thousand years already. He saw right belief as a romance of sanity: the thrill is in the creed itself, and the wildness is in the tradition.

His method is paradox. The key fits the lock precisely because it has an odd, awkward shape; the truth often looks just as strange until it clicks. "The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason," he wrote against a dry rationalism that shrinks the world to logic alone. In The Everlasting Man he answered the evolutionary reductionism that makes man merely a cleverer animal and Christ merely a skilled preacher; the book converted a young C. S. Lewis. In politics he argued for distributism – property broken up among many families instead of gathered into the state or the trusts.

Hence the famous Chesterton's fence: before you pull down a fence across a road, find out why it was put there, because a reformer who does not understand the past will break more than he mends. The Aquinas lecture on this site already speaks in his voice; here now is the man that voice belongs to.