Chesterton on the First Stage of Conversion

Last updated on: June 28, 2014 at 5:19 pm by David Mills

Chesterton on the First Stage of Conversion 2014-06-28T17:19:31-04:00 David Mills

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Earlier this morning I invoked Chesterton’s insight into conversion from his later book the Catholic Church and Conversion. In the first stage one comes to the Church’s defense or at least recognizes that she is being unfairly treated, a stage Chesterton calls “patronizing the Church.” Here’s the passage (the book can be found here):

It is my experience that the convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind. The first is when he imagines himself to be entirely detached, or even to be entirely indifferent, but in the old sense of the term, . . .

Referring to a defense of Catholicism he had written years before, when he nominally an Anglican, he wrote:

I imagined that I was noting certain fallacies partly for the fun of the thing and partly for a certain feeling of loyalty to the truth of things. But as a matter of fact, looking back on these notes (which I never published), it seems to me that I took a tremendous amount of trouble about it if I really regarded it as a trifle; and taking trouble has certainly never been a particular weakness of mine. It seems to me that something was already working subconsciously to keep me more interested in fallacies about this particular topic than in fallacies about Free Trade or Female Suffrage or the House of Lords.

Anyhow, that is the first stage in my own case and I think in many other cases: the stage of simply wishing to protect Papists from slander and oppression, not (consciously at least) because they hold any particular truth, but because they suffer from a particular accumulation of falsehood.

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