Which brings us to the Catholic Church. Why should it want to make him a saint? Why Chesterton and not—if you’re talking about great Catholic writers—Gerard Manley Hopkins? Or Walker Percy? Or Flannery O’Connor? Because Chesterton, in his jolly way, was a militant. A blaster of the superstitions of modernity, a toppler of the idols of materialism. He inveighed ceaselessly, at great length, and without ever once repeating himself, against “the thought-destroying forces of our time”: pessimism and determinism and pragmatism and impressionism. Wait—impressionism? The nice paintings? Oh, indeed. Impressionism was a terrible heresy, a kind of manifesto for self-absorption. “It means believing one’s immediate impressions at the expense of one’s more permanent and positive generalisations,” Chesterton argued in his study of William Blake. “It puts what one notices above what one knows.” He wasn’t always right, in other words. The chief obstacle to his sanctity will no doubt be his indefensible heap of writings on “the Jewish problem,” which brought out the worst in him—and continues to bring out the worst in his defenders.

But when he was right, he was prophetically right. Fearing and detesting the centripetal, black-hole suck of the almighty modern Self, he faced the other way: into the fact of Creation. There is a reality outside the mind, Chesterton insisted—and part of his energy was his innocent, unflagging astonishment that he had to keep on making the point. To us, the great solipsists, for whom the recognition of another human being requires a galvanic imaginative act, he speaks very directly.