CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - Gilbert Keith Chesterton, with his leonine shock of hair, walrus-mustache, ample girth, his cigar in hand, and his ready and elfish grin, seems the most unlikely of men to turn to to find a proof for God's existence.  But such a view would belie a lack of familiarity with the man.  It would be to judge a book by its cover, and a natural philosopher by his clothes.

As Aidan Nichols states in his book A Grammar of Consent, "Chesterton's writings contain what appears to be a novel argument for the existence of God.  This argument may be termed the argument from joy."  An argumentum e gaudio.

For Chesterton, joy was the appropriate response to being--that everything, rather than nothing, is--and this experience of joy, and the gratitude it engenders, was a window into the transcendent.

As Chesterton saw it, joy was something more than mere happiness, more than mere the experience of pleasure.  For him, in Aidan Nichols's words, "joy is the reaction to the fact that there should be such a thing as existence as such."  Joy, the chara of the Scriptures, was, in Chesterton's eyes, a sort of cousin to the wonder, the thaumata, of the philosophers.  This joy in existence as such contained "an implicit affirmation of the doctrine of creation, and hence of the truth of theism."

Chesterton noticed that joy is something that goes beyond science: science can describe it, but not fully answer the why of it.  Science cannot tell us why there is being as such rather than no being at all.  Chesterton observed that one could conclude from this either that joy has no meaning (which is hardly plausible) or (what is very probable) that joy had all the meaning in the world. 

Now, Chesterton, who himself might have been called a dumb ox, was as philosophically astute as the original dumb ox, St. Thomas Aquinas.  (One might recall here that the Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson considered Chesterton's biography on St. Thomas Aquinas "as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas.")  Though philosophically astute, Chesterton did not in any way write a philosophical treatise on joy.  His proof must therefore be distilled from his works-his essays, apologetical works, literary criticism, detective stories, plays, biographies, and verse--and his life. 

Chesterton had a joie de vivre, a joy of living, but a lot of men, including pagans and Enlightenment philosophers, have that.  Chesterton had something more than that: he also had a joie d'être, a joy of being.  And it reflects itself in his works.

For example, in his poem Ballad of the White Horse, a ballad of the days of King Alfred, G. K. Chesterton has a passage where he refers to "joy without a cause."  To understand the context, this phrase comes in a scene where the Blessed Virgin Mary comes to King Alfred the Great at the nadir of his struggle against the Danes:

Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?

The supernatural encounter with the Blessed Virgin Mary has its effect, and King Alfred goes to gather up his chiefs:

Up across windy wastes and up
Went Alfred over the shaws,
Shaken of the joy of giants,
The joy without a cause.
. . . .
And he set to rhyme his ale-measures,
And he sang aloud his laws,
Because of the joy of the giants,
The joy without a cause.

This joy has no earthly cause; hence, it is "without a cause."  The earth is the wrong place to find it.  This means that one who searches for its cause must open out into the infinite, upon He that is without cause: God, the Great Uncaused.  For Chesterton, the existence of God was the only thing that rendered his joie d'être intelligible.

As Chesterton framed it in his novel The Poet and the Lunatics:

"Man is creature; all his happiness consists in being a creature; or, as the Great Voice commanded us, in being a child.  All his fun is in having a gift or present; which the child, with profound understanding, values because it is a 'surprise.'  But surprise implies that a thing came from outside ourselves; and gratitude that it comes from someone other than ourselves."

Gift.  Joy.  Thanks.  Those are Chesterton's three themes that underlie his joie d'être.

Chesterton knew that there is an intimate connection between the experience of joy and the experience of grace or gift.  One might say that he recognized that the experience of joy is a natural analogue of supernatural grace.  It is not coincidence that the Greek word for joy--chara--is linguistically related to the Greek word ...