Chesterton was a journalist; he was a metaphysician. He was a reactionary; he was a radical. He was a modernist, acutely alive to the rupture in consciousness that produced Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”; he was an anti-modernist (he hated Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”). He was a parochial Englishman and a post-Victorian gasbag; he was a mystic wedded to eternity. All of these cheerfully contradictory things are true, and none of them would matter in the slightest were it not for the final, resolving fact that he was a genius. Touched once by the live wire of his thought, you don’t forget it. And what is genius? Genius is Hammy the squirrel, in DreamWorks Animation’s 2006 classic Over the Hedge, five seconds after he gulps down an energy drink. The Earth stutters on its axis and then stops turning, the soundtrack comes to a soupy halt, and Hammy saunters through a sudden, humming immobility, past the transfixed pest-control guy and around the frozen laser beams of the lawn-alarm system. He is, of course, moving at incredible speed—but with supernatural nonchalance. His ecstatic velocity has put everything around him into the slowness and vagueness of a dream. That’s what geniuses do.

“It would have been better perhaps,” Chesterton’s friend Hilaire Belloc wrote, “had he never fallen into verbalism (wherein he tended to exceed).” But he did not so much fall into verbalism as come somersaulting out of it, chucking one-liners like ninja stars. His prose, if you don’t like it, is an unnerving zigzag between flippancy and bombast—and somewhere behind that, even more unnerving, is the intimation that these might be two sides of the same thing. If you do like it, it’s supremely entertaining, the stately outlines of an older, heavier rhetoric punctually convulsed by what he once called (in reference to the Book of Job) “earthquake irony.” He fulminates wittily; he cracks jokes like thunder. His message, a steady illumination beaming and clanging through every lens and facet of his creativity, was really very straightforward: get on your knees, modern man, and praise God.

In his use of paradox it could be said, per Belloc, that he tended to excess. “One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.” “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” And so on. But Chesterton—born under Gemini, the sign of doubleness—is paradoxical because the world is paradoxical. I recently watched an episode of National Geographic Channel’s Outlaw Bikers in which was recounted the strange tale of the Fort Lauderdale Warlocks, a motorcycle gang consisting of undercover ATF agents. Swap the biker gang for a group of fin de siècle anarchists, and the ATF agents for English secret policemen, and you have, basically, the plot of The Man Who Was Thursday (except that in the novel the secret policemen are secret even to one another, each thinking that he alone has infiltrated the anarchist cell).