Customer Reviews

G.K. Chesterton The Apostle of Common Sense

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Dale Ahlquist does an invaluable service by dishing up the marvelous mind of the genius Chesterton. He loves this most lovable of geniuses, and provides such an elegant and right-on selection of Chestertonian insights that one cannot take notes fast enough. Here is the medicine for what ails us. Thank you, Dale Ahlquist.

This series, originally a series of TV shows on EWTN, is an excellent introduction to the work and the person of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. The host, Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society (www.chesterton.org) tells you so much about Chesterton's life, his work, his sense of humor; you feel like you are really getting to know the great writer. An actor, Chuck Chalberg, dresses like Chesterton, and then gives talks using Chesterton's great passages on science, faith, architecture, learning, thinking, pieces of chalk, beer and much, much more. Treat yourself to this series, and you won't regret it.

I recommend watching these.

I have seen some of these episodes on EWTN. When you listen to the excellent portrayal of Chesterton here, you get a wonderful sense of the wisdom of this great man. A seeker of truth, who found truth in everyday events right in front of us.

What do you want? The DVD is good, arrived a month ago in excesllent condition - Amen

Anyone who has watched American sitcoms and Disney films will note that when they want to highlight upper-crustiness, they give the character a British accent. Of course those of us who have actually sat through, and maybe snoozed a little, during Merchant-Ivory movies will recognize that a certain amount of Britishness can be conjured with almost Pavlovian stimulus of tweedy clothing and large manors. And of course the sly subliminal sense triggered--and to me incredibly tediously-- in the viewer that somehow this is world to which one secretly belongs. Well, that this is a rather cartoon predictability is surely indicated by the fact that the same tropes are present in sitcoms and Disney efforts, but of course with none of the elegant camera angles and soft focus of the Merchant-Ivory geniuses. But one step below even that cartoonish level is this rather incredible series of films about G.K. Chesterton. I can speak with some authority about the cinematic dalliances here because I have now seen many of them on the Catholic channel, EWTN, where they are regular filler. Chesteron was not considered a bright bulb, when I was pursuing philosophy and theology studies at the Catholic seminary and Pontifical institutions, His works were considered a quaint read by most priests, even conservative ones, and not more. But the times, they are a-changin'. In an age when most serious Catholic scholarship now seems to have lost any real critical edge (except perhaps for Biblical studies) a certain Disneyfied veneer of class is rather predictably needed to fill in for the lack of it, in terms of critical thinking. It is in this cultural ambit that these really execrable productions here are only comprehensible. Chesterton's rather wan wit is praised to the skies by the uniquely somnolent narrator Dale Ahlquist, but it is the serious matters that are more troublesome. The kind of prissy Thomism that Chesterton enunciated is a bad fit with the way in which Dale Ahlquist relentlessly tries to portray the man with his incredibly leading and tendentious commentary. Somehow the views of this three-hundred pound guy, on everything -- including asceticism!!! -- are supposed to be equivalent with common sense. A really labyrinthine logic is used by Ahlquist to somehow make this man's views, often incredibly dated and grimly hyper-idealized, seem really the most natural things in the world, after several mental somersaults. Mr. Ahlquist is engaged in one of the most breathtakingly aggressive attempts at anachronism that I have ever encountered. Were it not for the sheer historical grotesquerie of the anachronsim, the rather inspired badness of the films' production would actually make it kind of entertaining. The actor portraying Chesterton is thus deprived of an aesthetically "so-bad-it's-good" salvation. A shame because the uniqueness of the character evoked, who looks and acts like John Waters' Divine dressed like as a rumply English gent definitely had possibilities. But the very fierceness of Ahlquist's ambition reveals a cut-throat attitude to historical truth and the history of ideas, and cannot be enjoyed with impunity, even for laughs. Just to take a rather terrible, but potentially funny instance, the issue of Chesteron's smoking is used for political blandishment. Somehow Chesterton's smoking gives Mr. Ahlquist license to discourse on modern ideas of health, a serious matter for sure. But his insights are the very worst of the anchronisms. As a life-time non-smoker I recognize that an internally coherent libertarian argument can be made for not restricting smoking in a variety of ways. But Ahlquist goes far beyond this. He uses his Chesterton's Thomism to somehow question the very desirability of the health gains that would come from not smoking. Thus, curiously, like all anachronism it displays hyper- idealism and concomitant lack of matter-of-factness about issues of simple finitude. And naturally this blowzy sense of things, is construed, especially because of the British accent, as a better sense of finitude itself. Quite incredible for delusory thinking. But in fact it all became less incredible to me when I saw this same Ahlquist fellow appear on a panel on EWTN where he actually seemed to be hoping for the collapse of our American civilization itself. In his benighted mind, because he does not like this or that about our culture -- and who doesn't!?? -- that is a justification for this sort of perverse logic: according to him, the only way for the culture to be saved is by its very collapse. Thus this bizarre Neo-Chesteronian view, is at length revealed, at least in Mr. Ahlquist's retelling as a curiously sub rosa form of nihilism.