“FAITH IS ... COMMON SENSE TRANSFIGURED”: CHESTERTON’S FATHER BROWN AS A FIGURE OF COMMON SENSE
“FAITH IS ... COMMON SENSE TRANSFIGURED”: CHESTERTON’S FATHER BROWN AS A FIGURE OF COMMON SENSE

Summary/Abstract: The Father Brown stories by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, featuring a detective priest, are informed by the writer’s views on religious and philosophical issues contained in his non-fictional works. It is not surprising in the light of the writer’s following statement: “In short, I could not be a novelist; because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women” (Chesterton 1936: 289). Chesterton treated his fiction primarily as a vehicle for presenting his ideas and his detective stories touch upon one that looms large in his work: common sense. In the present essay I will analyse the notion of common sense in his non-fictional works (mainly Orthodoxy) and then show how it surfaces in two stories featuring Father Brown. In order to grasp Chesterton’s idea of common sense one needs to refer to Orthodoxy, where in the second chapter he proposes, for the sake of argument, to judge modern thoughts and theories “by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits” (Chesterton 1909: 23), just like in the past they were judged by whether they “tended to make a man lose his soul” (23). It seems that for Chesterton common sense means simply sanity, and it is proper use of reason (within certain bounds defined by “proper first principles” (46)) and what he calls mysticism that sustain it. Needless to say, in his view there is no contradiction here.

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