I was privileged this past weekend to be one of the speakers at the second annual G. K. Chesterton Conference in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. One of the highlights of this vibrant event was hearing a delightful homeschooled student read the essay with which she had won a Chesterton essay contest. The highly gifted young lady, Lilliana Johnson, has granted me permission to publish the essay on the Ink Desk. I am honoured to do so. Read on:

 

 

“Veritas Numquam Perit”

by Lilliana Johnson

 

Imagine, if you will, a modern automobile careening down a lonely highway. It hurtles forward inimically, seeming to dare anything to cross its path. Suddenly, it screeches to a halt, forced to abandon its suicidal race; for challenging its trajectory is a single turnpike-gate. The automobile revs its motor, growling with hostility at the humble hindrance, hungering to flatten it and thus be rid of yet one more antiquated restriction of progress. It craves to mow it down, just as it has mown down centuries of tradition and hierarchy without one scruple. Such is the nature of our modern epoch – like a relentless machine it seeks to level all things, for it is prideful, and therefore despises hierarchy, and it is liberal, and therefore seeks to eradicate all boundaries and definitions.

Chesterton states that no age deserves less to claim progress than our own. Yet the world has become consumed by this frenzied need for bounding forward into the dark. Yet to what end? Can a culture that holds truth in contempt claim to understand reality better than our ancestors, or that feeds off of mass-production and Big Business assert a deeper appreciation of beauty than the artisans of old, or that murders millions of its population as an industry maintain to have goodness at the heart of its intent for its people? As Chesterton says, “Progress itself cannot progress.” (Chesterton 41) Without a definite end, means become likewise obscured, until savagery becomes an accepted mode of so-called “progress.” Without a destination, one may just as easily be moving backwards, or downwards – or nowhere – rather than forwards. “[Man] has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.” (Chesterton 48)

Chesterton furthermore contradicts the misconception that “medieval” means “ignorant,” by presenting brilliant scholars of the Middle Ages such as Dante, Chaucer, and St. Thomas Aquinas. If The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, and the Summa Theologiæ be the fruits of ignorance, then at long last I understand that enigmatic phrase, “Ignorance is bliss!” If the great Gothic cathedrals, towering mightily across Europe, be colossal attestations to ignorance, then by all means, let me revel in ignorance! The modern world disdains the medieval one not because of its ignorance, but because of its wisdom. Confronting that glorious age would force the moderns to confront truth, beauty, and goodness – three things necessarily rejected by a society that rejects God. The men of today desire freedom, peace, and justice, yet spurn the God Who remains the sole source of these, and thus live in a world of their twisted parodies: enslaving anarchy, moral tolerance, and usurped authority.

The world needs a turnpike. More specifically, a 300 pound cigar -smoking journalist turnpike. One that compells them to stop, and think – one that brings them face-to-face with the common sense, or rather Catholic sense, that has become all too uncommon of late. Chesterton is a capital antidote to the malady of indifference, for he awakens the sleeping world with the fresh air of reality. He combats the disease of relativism with the gleaming blade of truth. With his grand eloquence and literary pyrotechnics, he towers alongside the vast cathedrals, living and vibrant. Let us take up arms by the side of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and in the name of Truth, defend that inextinguishable, eternal, unfading relic of medievalism – the Catholic Church, whose perennial wisdom resounds throughout the ages, echoed by all those who partake in the Great Conversation.