A philosophy of light

What follows is an open lecture hosted by Akademia’s NP van Wyk Louw Centre on 19 March 2026. My thanks to Akademia for their hospitality, and to Dr Daniël Maritz for the invitation.

While on the topic of GK Chesterton, keep your eyes open for the book Chesterton and the Philosophers (Wipf & Stock, 2026), expertly edited by Landon Loftin. It’s a remarkable publishing event, the first book to actively put Chesterton in conversation with well-known philosophers. I have a chapter in it called ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Marx’, and there are magnificent contributions by Dale Ahlquist, Julian Ahlquist, Kevin Belmonte, David P. Deavel, Joe Grabowski, Ted Janiszewski, Peter Kreeft, Landon Loftin, Louis Markos, Philip Irving Mitchell, Edward A. W. Stengel and Wojciech Załuski.

Towards the beginning of his 1905 book Heretics, GK Chesterton tells the following little parable:

“Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, ‘Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good —’. At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.”1

In many ways, this echoes what we see happening in and around the university today. It’s a tricky institution, and people hardly agree on its purpose. For the record, mind you, I am speaking here of the university in general, not of any particular university. I’m aware of trends, as well as exceptions.

Anyway, the more censorious consider the university an indoctrination machine. Peter Thiel, one of the world’s worst interpreters of René Girard, has said that “one of the downsides of too much education is that you get the most brainwashed,” and this resonates with Thomas Sowell’s contention that “[t]oo much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.” The current Vice President of the USA, JD Vance, who has two university degrees, has said (without a hint of irony), “Professors are the enemy.” To date, there are no signs he plans to renounce his qualifications.

Still, the negative view of the university is common, and you’ll even find it in Chesterton’s work, albeit couched in humour. He writes the following in one of his essays, while jokingly classifying humanity into three groups:

“Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come to think of it), we probably belong to this class of people ourselves. The second class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research.”2

The “psychological cleavage” Chesterton means has to do with whether or not we can participate in the common life of sane people, by investing not only in the humdrum but in pursuing the best life has to offer in the love of God and neighbour.3 Even Poets can participate in the sentiments of ordinary people, but they can “carry the popular sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch.” As Chesterton says, “The Poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them.” But, importantly, they do not detach themselves from others for the sake of a mental prison constructed by the intellect.

Professors are troublesome because they are bad Poets. They should have the capacity to help people understand themselves and the world a bit better, but they often fail by locking themselves out of the world of normal people. And yet, Chesterton is not convinced that all Professors are really of the kind he’s talking about. Some Professors are Poets. Some Poets are People. And some People are really Professors. I am relieved to report, in other words, that Chesterton’s distinction is to be treated poetically, not literally.

But it’s still true that the university is often a cause for concern, as it was in Chesterton’s day. A new dark age is upon us, and it runs on electricity. It is possibly even darker than the previous dark age, by which I mean the Enlightenment. Our age is often characterised as a time of metacrisis, with various entangled instabilities and difficulties evident at all levels of life. Many people don’t know how to make sense of things. They don’t know how to begin to deal with the troubles of our time.

Simply put, the metacrisis is a crisis of meaning, and the university has been a poor defence against it. The very institution established to safeguard understanding often seems to have become a storehouse of fashionable nonsense and incoherence. With this in mind, my proposal is simple. If we want to get through the meaning crisis, especially in the university, we should turn to a relentless seeker of wonders, whose philosophy of life was bound up in gratitude and humility, and a great deal of laughter. We need a poet. We need Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

I’ll give three main reasons for this. First, Chesterton lived and wrote during a similar meaning crisis, called the Edwardian cultural crisis. Second, he became aware of that crisis during a time of personal psychological suffering as an undergraduate student in the Slade Art School at University College London. He saw the university context as mirroring and fostering moral decay and nihilism. His distress encouraged him to become, thank heavens, a university dropout, but it seems his university experience fueled his fight against cultural degeneracy throughout his working life. Third and finally, Chesterton’s answers to the meaning crisis of his own time still hold today. I can’t get to all of them, unfortunately, but I will get to a few. Here, I want to do two things. I want to explore the nature and consequences of the meaning crisis, and I want to offer a provisional Chestertonian response to it.

Broadly speaking, the crisis of meaning involves a breakdown and a shrinkage of sensemaking. Typically, modernity is blamed for this, although the deeper cause, which we’ll get to, is moral. Chesterton says that it is the “special mark of the modern world” that it is rooted in unconscious dogmatism, which masquerades as open-mindedness. The modern world is “dogmatic without knowing it.”4 If this is true, and I think it is, it would be good to know the nature of these unconscious dogmas.

Properly explaining modernity’s assumptions is a massive topic on its own, but the abridged version is that modernity is a way of thinking that opposes Ur-Platonism (as defined by Lloyd Gerson). By implication, it is also opposed to Christianity, which is “Platonism for the people” as Nietzsche called it. Nietzsche meant this as an insult, but it is a compliment in my book. Gerson defines Ur-Platonism by five negative positions: anti-materialism, anti-mechanism, anti-nominalism, anti-relativism, and anti-scepticism.5 These five ‘antis’ imply a definite Realism, which affirms the cosmos as originating in and as sustained by a simple, benevolent, absolute principle — the Good or God — and stresses that we can know, with remarkable certainty, that reality is intelligible, purposeful, hierarchical, and morally significant.

As I’ve said, though, modernity opposes Ur-Platonism and affirms the opposite: materialism, mechanism, nominalism, relativism, and scepticism. These positive affirmations ultimately suggest an antagonistic stance towards reality as a harmonious whole. Modernity offers a kind of thinking that places a certain conception of autonomous human reason at the centre of legitimate knowledge, value-seeking and world-making, and treats reality as fundamentally calculable, malleable, and open to progressive transformation through rational methods. Overwhelmingly, modernity emphasises power or will against the Realist concern with knowing and understanding.

As Iain McGilchrist shows us, placing manipulability at the centre of how we approach the world ensures that it will appear meaningless to us. Take the example of the miner who sees a landscape not as a beautiful gift with its own profound ecology but as an irritation that must be obliterated so that raw materials can be extracted from it. It’s the same sort of thinking that has created human resources departments, the pornography industry, Netflix, and the publish-or-perish model in the university context.

Chesterton’s own image for this frame of mind is simply egotism. This is the moral problem beneath the intellectualist’s facade. Fascinatingly, Chesterton locates the origins of modernity, not in bad ideas simply considered, but in bad ideas as manifestations of sin or moral degradation. A profound alienation from God and, consequently, from being itself causes us to fall into that mode of cognition we call modernity. And this fall has disastrous consequences for the life of the mind. Chesterton writes the following to clarify the relationship between egotism — what he calls “egoism” — and intellectual life:

“Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain knowledge. … The most brilliant exponent of the egoistic school, Nietzsche, with deadly and honourable logic, admitted that the philosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down upon the weak, the cowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightful experience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he sees everything foreshortened or deformed.”6

If the foundations of our current meaning crisis are found in modernity, and if modernity is ultimately rooted in sin, the chief consequence is a crisis of participation: a crisis with respect to the Transcendent and its transcendentals — truth, beauty, and goodness. It is a crisis about how we relate to logos, mythos, and ethos. Denying our participation in a divine order naturally leads to the shattering of everything, since it is no longer held to be sharing a single origin. A disintegrated life becomes unavoidable.

How might this affect universities? The obvious answer is that the university (the very name suggests a turn towards unity) will become a multiversity (a turn towards multiplicity, fragmentation, and disunity). Yes, I’m aware of the rise of entertainment dealing with a ‘multiverse’, and I don’t think this is a coincidence in a time of meaning crisis.

Arguably, the many issues suffered by universities now stem, in large part, from the excommunication or sidelining of theology and theological-informed philosophy. As Chesterton says, “Because the elementary school doesn’t teach theology, it must be excused when it doesn’t teach anything. The bias of the modern world is so enormous that it will allow a thing to be inefficient as long as it is also irreligious.”7 If the discernible order of reality is denied any sense of an organising principle (logos), narrative cohesion (mythos), and an ethical relation to whatever is beyond us (ethos), then everything will be thrown into disarray. Detachment from reality cannot end well. But if the discernible unity and order of reality is affirmed, it’s easy enough to argue for what sort of shape a university should take.

John Henry Newman, whom Chesterton admired, had just such a shape in mind as he wrote his famous book, The Idea of the University, published in 1852. Newman proposed that the core purpose of the university is to cultivate the intellect through the pursuit and teaching of universal knowledge. This means the university should not aim to provide vocational training or produce immediate practical outcomes. This is controversial, and I would want to add some caveats, but I agree with the basic idea: what is highest and best should be placed first; and what is functional should be ordered towards it. The university, in this picture, should serve the knowledge of reality as an interconnected whole.

Chesterton, as a polymath, exemplifies this in the way he talks about everything, using the common to talk about the sublime. “You cannot evade the issue of God,” he writes, “whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him … If Christianity should happen to be true — that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe — then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.”8 With this in mind, the primary aim of the university remains (or should remain) intellectual formation, not job-training. And knowledge, in this view, has intrinsic value and should not be functionalised. Newman’s view, as echoed by Chesterton, does not disparage practical training, nor does it dismiss the importance of those aspects of our lives that need to function well. But the order needs to be right. First things should be put first.

Chesterton provides a useful example of this. “It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me,” he says. “It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.”9 The job of the physician has great value, obviously. Dealing with bodily matters is fine. But it is because of the philosophical conviction that the human being is precious that we call the doctor in to help him. If we get our evaluations wrong, we might start to do insane things, like refusing to let people see dying loved ones because medical protocols need to be followed, as happened during COVID-19, or we’ll end up euthanising people because they’re too poor or depressed to look after themselves, as Canada is doing. Here’s how Chesterton considers getting our evaluations wrong with respect to education:

“It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to children. The smaller our faith in doctrine, the larger our faith in doctors.”10

We will drown in trivialities when we forget the meaning of things. The chief consequence of failing to understand and interpret things in the light of truth, beauty, and goodness is pretty much what we find in so many universities now.

This is evident in the usual list of problems faced by universities: enrollment is declining, with implications for revenue; student costs are rising, and student debt is a worry (as economists would say, this raises questions about return-on-investment, especially as unemployment rises among university graduates); and public confidence in universities is at an all-time low. This is not helped by the often-correct perception that well-adjusted kids leave home to be indoctrinated into whatever ideology happens to be fashionable. Universities also suffer from administrative problems. And all of this is just for starters.

People working in universities would add a few things to this usual list of woes. They’d mention that the university has become a place of corporate managerialism, rather than a place of higher learning. They’d say that the main measure of their work is some metric or ranking, instead of some value or quality. They’d mention problems around academic publishing, which some would say is a scam. In his book Dark Academia, Peter Fleming calls the university a “zombie” institution because outwardly it looks a bit like what it used to be while inwardly rotting in the muck of its own non-sentience. He says everyone in academia knows the game is rigged, and yet they still feel compelled to play along. He assumes, like some sweet Summer child, that all of us are playing along, rather than being secret operatives for the Divine Ideas, including the idea of the university.

Something is missing in all the complaining. When you look at the many failures people are quickest to bring up, their focus is overwhelmingly on functional matters. The temptation in this is to answer so many functional problems with merely functional solutions. And yet, an idea often attributed to Albert Einstein is worth keeping in mind here: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking [or consciousness] we used when we created them.” Chesterton would agree with this. He opposes the kind of reasoning that gets trapped within itself. Overreliance on isolated, hyperlogical reasoning without a broader perspective or faith leads to insanity. He writes, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”11

“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”12

In response to a world fixated on the wrong things, Chesterton offers us the idea of a “higher anarchy.”13 This is a noble and authentic anarchy that strives to retrieve and defend the higher ideals against the tyranny of the lower. It is a rebellion of heaven against hell and of unity against multiplicity. Chesterton does not promote a destructive ideological anarchism but a creative anarchy that works beyond the usual modern constraints and even with them. The way out is through. We need to transcend the error Chesterton calls a “huge modern heresy,” which tried “to alter the human soul to fit modern social conditions, instead of altering modern social conditions to fit the human soul.”

Someone once asked Chesterton what book he’d take if he were ever stranded on a desert island. His quick-witted answer was, “Thomas’ Guide to Practical Shipbuilding.” What would he say if we were to ask him what he’d do if he got stranded inside a university? Well, he experienced this very thing, and his answer was similarly sensible. He jumped ship. He left. In the end, however, his connection to the university as an institution was not entirely negative. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Notre Dame in America, and he responded to that honour with wonder and gratitude.

I think there’s still room for wonder and gratitude, even in this time. I think reviving the university is better than euthanising it. There is much that is still good in universities, even though we should not be blind to their problems. While so much discourse in and around the university is filled with condemnation, my own experience has been very far from terrible. There are signs that the idea of the university is still alive in universities, even if it has been relegated to a storage cupboard that far too few professors know how to find.

I know many who want education to be more Chestertonian and are doing their part to make it so, both here and abroad. Chesterton defines education as “simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”14 Elsewhere, he writes, “The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.”15 Education can educate people to recognise the limits of education. Chesterton has this to say on this idea:

“Real education precisely consists in the fact that we see beyond the symbols and the mere machinery of the age in which we find ourselves: education precisely consists in the realisation of a permanent simplicity that abides behind all civilisations, the life that is more than meat, the body that is more than raiment. The only object of education is to make us ignore mere schemes of education. Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”16

Chesterton also says this: “No man who worships education has got the best out of education ... Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.”17

Chesterton’s posture towards education is like that of the patriot. He was a great defender of patriotism, and it is with his view of patriotism in mind that we get a better sense of what he’d say to the university. In Orthodoxy, he notes that a lot of people criticise the world as if they’re house-hunting. But this is to fail to recognise something obvious: “A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted ... he has loyalty long before he has any admiration.”

Loyalty is the primary thing in patriotism. If someone wants to criticise his country, he should do so as a loyalist, not as someone who is nation-hunting. He should criticise it because he loves it and wants it to improve. He will then see problems not as things someone else needs to deal with, while he goes to live elsewhere, but as things he can do something about because it is his home. He belongs to it, just as it belongs to him.

How might Chesterton deal with the global university obsession with reductionism? Already, I’ve said enough to imply that the answer to the foolishness of modernity is something very un-modern, although not necessarily anti-modern — something like Ur-Platonism. But we must not be too simplistic about this. To rashly replace the ‘modern’ with something like the ‘traditional’ risks filling the same reductionistic thinking with different signs, as is evident everywhere that ‘trad’ memes are shared. We may end up not with an authentic recovery of truth, beauty and goodness, or a profound revival of a sense of God and being, but with fundamentalism or (what Chesterton called) Puritanism. We may end up, in other words, with something traditional in name only but modern in character.

What will be missed, in other words, is that we need something akin to the awakening Plato suggests in his story of the cave. We do not want the cave-dweller’s version of a reality he has not experienced, but the illumination of reality itself. Plato was well aware that the genuinely enlightened one who tries to convert others to his way of seeing is likely to be killed, or cancelled, especially when he is outnumbered by cave-dwellers.

We need to be as “wise as serpents and as meek as doves.”18 What is often required is a subtle form of exposure therapy, whereby the cave-dweller can gradually grow accustomed to the sharp light of reality. What we need is a kind of apologetics, (again) not of the modernist variety that seeks to fit daylight notions into darkened minds, but which seeks to gradually help those minds to emerge into a bigger view of things.

In a paper I wrote last year on Chesterton and the meaning crisis, I suggested a “hermeneutic of redemption” like the one we find in Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925). The idea is straightforward. Chesterton puts on the modern reductionist frame as one might put on a pair of glasses. He assesses two things in the way moderns around him were assessing them. First, he adopts the perspective that the creature called man is merely an animal. But taking this stance is soon shown to be unsuitable. The human being does not fit into that category. He is too large and strange for it. Then, Chesterton takes a look at the man called Christ, this time adopting the modern point of view that he must have been merely a person, albeit a very good one. Soon, this is shown to be ludicrous. Christ was clearly more human than any person has ever been, but he was also more than that.

What if we were to follow this sort of approach on most things, especially when thinking of the university? We would start where everyone else starts, showing them that we take their shadows seriously. Then, we would demonstrate how their shadows say more than we should expect any shadow to say. Soon enough, it’ll look as if we do need some other explanation after all, like a complicated key, to fit the complicated lock we have discovered. With some coaxing, we will be able to show people — maybe not everyone, but certainly not no one — that beneath the disintegrating university is an idea worth recovering.

Chesterton offers an approach we all can learn from. He says we need to get impractical. We need the “unpractical man.”19 He writes, “When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all.” It is fine to notice that not all is well with the university, in general or particular, as the case may be. But then we must have some sense of what a good university is, and how to retrieve such a thing within our own modernity-infected institutions and lives. Modernity wants to avoid one thing above all: what is good. Chesterton says as much in Heretics, just a few pages on from that parable of the lamppost:

“Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about ‘liberty’; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about ‘progress’; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about ‘education’; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, ‘Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.’ This is, logically rendered, ‘Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.’ He says, ‘Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.’ This, logically stated, means, ‘Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.’ He says, ‘Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.’ This, clearly expressed, means, ‘We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.’”

Chesterton gets to the essence when he says that what’s wrong with the world is that we do not ask what is right, but I think that it’s a question worth asking and answering again and again and again.