A Thing Must Be Loved

Chesterton for a Stoic

I think like a Stoic now, most of the time. I find comfort in restraint, in steadiness and in the work of aligning life with reason. It helps.  

It wasn’t always this way. I’m naturally drawn to intensity. To the inner life. To beauty, sadness, and the search for meaning. There’s a dignity in that world, but also a risk of getting stuck in it. Stoicism, for me, has been a kind of ballast. A way to keep shape. To not be swept away.

Which is probably why Chesterton unsettles me. And why I love him.

He wasn’t tidy. His thoughts spun out in great loops and flourishes. He contradicted himself cheerfully. He laughed too loud, missed appointments, delighted in nonsense. His faith wasn’t serene. In fact, I’ve heard one person describe it as explosive. He could write of the world’s brokenness with gravity, and in the same breath call it a carnival.

What I find in Chesterton is a kind of sacred excess. A bigness. Not in ego, but in affection. He was outrageous in how much he cared for things. He didn’t hold back. He saw the world as a gift, not a problem. There’s something deeply compelling about that. 

Of all his one-liners and essays, there’s one that returns to me often. I can’t quite explain it, but it has settled into the way I think. He wrote:

“There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”

It’s the kind of sentence that seems simple enough when you first read it. It only begins to unravel you later.

We’re used to thinking the other way around. That someone must become lovable first. People need to be worthy, improved, repaired, the thinking goes. Then we will love them and extend patience or grace. Then we will stay.

But Chesterton was not interested in symmetry. He never believed that things had to justify their own beauty. Nor did he hold that people had to earn our delight or approval. He had it that the love itself, offered first, was what made the rest possible. Affection could precede explanation. Joy could arrive before reason.

It’s a deeply unsensible way to live. And perhaps the only sane one.

You can hear it, if you like, as an idea about God. But also as an idea about everything else. Lovers, Family. Strangers. The awkwardness of your own company. The work you haven’t finished. The bad habits you haven’t shaken. The diseased ash tree outside your window that still remains, trying.

It’s hard to practise. Harder still when we’ve grown so used to judgment being the door we must pass through before welcome is allowed.

But love, the kind that accepts what is, doesn’t wait for signs. It begins. It moves toward. It says yes before you’re ready. And it says it again tomorrow.

Chesterton’s writing was full of this strange, upside-down hospitality. He loved the poor. He loved paradox. He loved jokes, and pubs, and long walks with no particular point. In this he shared many values with Charles Dickens. His writings on Dickens are more tribute than criticism. He saw him not just as a literary genius but also as a courageous moral hero. Both men shared a fierce love of the ordinary, the comic, the poor, the overlooked. The things the world tries to tidy away. Chesterton wrote about Dickens the way a friend might write a eulogy. He honoured the beauty and shape of his soul.

I’ve heard rumours that there are people campaigning for Chesterton to be canonised. I hope they succeed. He’d make great saint. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t perfect, but he made holiness seem full of laughter. “Angels can fly,” he said, “because they take themselves lightly.” He did too. And it made the world feel lighter around him.

He once said that “in Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.” That sounds like a joke until you realise he meant it. He believed in the kind of faith that could hold sorrow and beer and blessing in the same breath.

He also believed that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” A line that has saved me many a time. But that’s how grace works: awkward, slow, unearned.

And somewhere beneath it all, there was a sense of freedom at play. “It is the test of a good religion,” he said, “whether you can joke about it.” That, I think, is the spirit of a man who saw truth as something strong enough to laugh with.

A thing must be loved before it is lovable. He meant it not as a theory, but as a way of walking through the day.

And if you begin from there, from love instead of evaluation, you start to see things differently. You stop asking whether someone deserves your kindness. You stop measuring your own life by its usefulness. You start to notice the details again. You hear the sound of your friend’s voice. You feel the warmth in a room. You see the way morning light falls unevenly on a cluttered table.

Through Stoicism I have learnt to value clarity and stillness and the discipline of believing less than I feel. But every now and then, a Chesterton sentence or joke slips past my defences. Something unguarded stirs. A window opens and I feel the nudge to love the unfinished and untidy things in myself more. And not only in myself. That, I think, is the point.