Taken from Undset’s translation of Chesterton’s masterpiece, published in Norwegian in 1931. Translated by Geir Hasnes.

Some bishop is said to have stated that if St. Paul had been living in our time, he would have been a journalist. The bishop supposedly was an American, which makes the story more likely.

G.K. Chesterton was already a journalist, when in the 1908 book Orthodoxy, he solemnly professed his faith in Christianity. I say “solemnly,” for if any book is that, it is this one. It is a soul’s autobiography, it is a polemical depiction of the conceptual confusion of the period immediately preceding the World War. In the whole mayfly swarm of subjective religions and worldviews, built on scientific working hypotheses that all of us born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have had to wade through, it gives a presentation of the main teachings of orthodox Christianity. A man must end up believing these, only if he can keep awake his skepticism towards everything even while keeping his sympathy with everything human. In other words: if he can continue to be a good skeptic without despairing [Norwegian word play: skeptic (“tvile”), despair (“fortvile”) – Trans.].

Yet the form of the book was certainly not what people generally understand by solemn. It was, among other things, a confession from a man who had been converted to a faith in a religion that counts humility among the cardinal virtues. And as Chesterton himself has said: “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. And especially (in this age of egoistic idealism) there is about one who defends humility something inexpressibly rakish.”

He has repeatedly characterized humility as an overwhelming, blissful, and happy sense of insignificance. It is the kind of feeling that seizes a healthy young man when he has received his lover’s yes; or a bright young boy when the man he idolizes takes notice of him; or what makes a small child forget himself when he sees the whole sky full of crackling fireworks; or what any ordinary person with normal self-awareness is seized by when he has been driven to believe in the Almighty who promises that he will be allowed to pass through pearly gates and walk on streets of gold. So there was no reason for Chesterton in his self-confessions to tell of his own performance in the contemporary Comedy of Errors with any other kind of seriousness than that of gaiety. He himself, in Heretics – the book he published immediately before writing Orthodoxy – replied to those of his critics who accused him of making fun of even the most serious subjects: “About what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects?” Taking God’s name in vain, is not to take and use it in well-considered jest, it is not even to use it in thoughtless jest, it is to use it in thoughtless solemnity.

A great many gullible people, however, have come to the opinion that G.K. Chesterton is merely a great joker and paradox maker par excellence. Thus I myself happened to come across a naive characterization of Chesterton the other day in an article by Carl Knap and H. Eitrem on English Literature in the Gymnasium. But it is perhaps not so incomprehensible that many people both then and now have regarded Chesterton’s Christianity with some distrust. A man’s most sacred convictions are rarely a cause for his loud and endless mirth. There is no shortage of people who fight valiantly for their convictions and work tirelessly for their convictions. Neither Chesterton’s fabulous diligence nor his ever-vigilant combativeness is anything special. The strange thing is when a man’s holiest convictions set him on fire like a heavy and fiery wine. It rarely happens outside the denomination to which Chesterton belongs, and even there, if it happens, it is rare. Wine does not work the same on all constitutions. And yet it is one of the most striking phenomena that constantly repeats itself in church history; Christianity works like this and has done so since the first day of Pentecost, when better people in Jerusalem looked disapprovingly at the strange behavior of a group of Galilean lower class people and thought, “They must be drunk.”

Solemnity can easily become blasphemous when people speak solemnly of such things as faith and hope and love or patriotism without having thoroughly thought it out beforehand. And anyone who knows this has a good reason to approach these subjects with such tools as the sharpened paradox, the metaphor that is really alive, the antithesis. Or they honor common traditions to which people have bound themselves from time immemorial, just as the sacrificial priests of antiquity wore headbands and armbands when they professed their faith in divine things and their love for human things.

Chesterton’s poems form a relatively small part of his voluminous output, but he will be remembered as a poet, when most of his efforts from day to day in today’s contentious issues are no longer relevant. Lepanto has been called one of the three or five greatest war poems in world literature. His religious poems (including the Collected Poems and The Queen of Seven Swords) express the pathos and mysticism of Christian faith, ranging from apocalyptic images of the first and last things to the solemn and tender adoration of the child in the manger. Wine, Water and Song contains the most ravishing declarations of love for the good and beautiful things of this earth, the things he has elsewhere called Tremendous Trifles.

Chesterton’s writings are otherwise so overwhelming in scope and cover so many fields that it is tempting to conclude with the quote from one of his English critics, which Henning Kehler has already quoted in his preface to the Danish translation of Orthodoxy: “It is as easy to produce a panorama of the bird in the sky as to give a coherent impression of Chesterton’s authorship.” He has written plays and novels, essays, short stories, historical and literary monographs, studies on social issues. And from the small weekly that he started a number of years ago – G.K.’s Weekly – a group of combative advocates has gradually formed a movement for the sacred rights of the common man, which have been violated and threatened with complete destruction as much by the modern Capitalist system as by Fascist and Bolshevist state despots. The Distributist movement took off from the start almost like a mosquito buzzing around the most colossal monuments of our own time, but it has grown, is constantly growing, and one comes across its viewpoints or viewpoints that are closely related to them more and more often in European and American intellectual life, and even outside Catholic circles. There are for instance many and tangible points of contact between Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity, which was published in 1927, and the exceedingly interesting program written by twelve young southern state Americans, I’ll take my Stand, published the year before. Without any conscious connection between the two books, both represent that same doubt about current thinking yet the same affinity in the ideals, if not in the faith.

Danish critics Harald Nielsen and Henning Kehler have pointed out the philosophical similarities that exist between Chesterton and Søren Kierkegaard. One can find similarities in their outlook on life, but their approach to life is fundamentally different. A Dutch essayist, Anton von Duinkerken, has characterized Chesterton’s leitmotif as “Romantik der reinen Vernunft” [“The Romance of Pure Reason”]. Hence the impatience – in itself a symptom of fatigue – that characterizes the weakest parts of his vast production. It comes to the fore when he polemicizes against the enlightened and evolution-believing children of the old Bible-believing Protestants, those who have transported their rock-solid literal faith from the Bible to other printed matter. Eagerly and seriously, they derive their arguments against the faith from strange old books from the end of the nineteenth century which we remember having read once in our youth and forgotten long ago, and they firmly believe that when a Catholic says “God created the oak,” he is confusing the acorn with God. Well, that’s the kind of polemic that only exists because “forgetting must have its place,” and Chesterton has never harbored any fear of contributing to what is to be forgotten. He has sprinkled his diary leaves as generously as any oak has shed leaves in England’s forests and parks. And we have seen the great things up in his shadow.

[As addendum, Undset provides a list of Chesterton books translated into Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, and then adds the following note.]

About Chesterton translations, what some Frenchman has said about all translations applies in particular, namely that they are like women – they are either beautiful or faithful. I myself have time and again been at a loss as to how faithfully I should follow Chesterton’s text, which is English for Englishmen. He never seems to offer potential translators a sympathetic thought. I have sometimes retained the English use of an inter-European loanword when the English use of the word is more correct than the Norwegian (e.g. where Chesterton writes “civilization,” we would use the word “culture”). I have sometimes rendered foreign names as the English do. For example “Confucius,” because I have never been able to get a convincing message about what is most correct to call China’s great philosopher. On the other hand, I have not been able to agree to call Publius Vergilius Maro by the name of Virgil, even though there is a good old tradition for that from the time he still was a living force in Europe’s intellectual life.

Lillehammer, September 1931.

Sigrid Undset.