Knight of the Holy Ghost

Knight of the Holy Ghost: A Short History of GK Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist, 171 pages

Like Chesterton's own biographies, Knight of the Holy Ghost is not a conventional retelling of a man's life, but rather an allusive attempt to express his personality.  If there is anyone now alive qualified to write such a book, it is Dale Ahlquist, who has spent decades studying and celebrating his subject.  Here, he considers the larger-than-life Chesterton in three complementary roles - as man, writer, and saint - yet it is as the titular knight that these are united.  Recognizing that, as he wrote in The Ballad of the White Horse, "the old barbarian" had now "come with scroll and pen", Chesterton took up his own pen with the same spirit with which the protagonists of The Ball and the Cross took up their swords, or Innocent Smith took up his pistol.  Chesterton was a knight of the Holy Spirit because he was a knight of the apocalypse, which is to say a knight of revelation.  In his voluminous writings, whether poetry or fiction, biography or criticism, apologetics or journalism, he lays bare the follies but also the wonders of the world, and yet he does so not merely for the joy of the unmasking, but in order to discover and rediscover the One who has overcome the world.