President Fahey, Members of the Faculty, Parents, Relatives, Friends, and especially, Class of 2017: In fact, forget all those other people I mentioned, starting with President Fahey. I’m just going to address you, the graduating seniors. And I’m going to tell you something that you have probably suspected but that you now know is true: the most difficult thing about graduating from college is having to listen to the commencement speaker. Here you are. You’ve done everything right. You’ve earned your degrees. You’re this close to receiving your diploma, and then some guy that they got from somewhere is standing up here saying…something…about something. I’m truly sorry about all this.

But as long as I’m here, let me at least take this opportunity to bring up G.K. Chesterton. I’m hoping that the fat guy will somehow make this a better experience for all of us.

Chesterton said he did not mind being called fat. He did not even mind being supposed to mind to being called fat. He said, “It is impossible to be fat in secret.” During World War I, he was accosted by a woman on a London sidewalk, he demanded, “Young man, why aren’t you out at the front.” He responded, “Madam, if step around on this side, you’ll see that I ‘out at the front.’”

We have a firsthand account from a woman who attended Chesterton’s parish in Beaconsfield, England, that her priest said to her, “I haven’t seen you at Mass for the last three Sundays,” and she responded, “Oh, I was there, Father. I was sitting behind Mr. Chesterton.”

Chesterton claimed to be the politest man in all of England, because he could stand up on a bus and offer his seat to three women at one time. He also said he was the jolliest man in all of England, because “there’s such a lot of me having a good time at once.”

He was not afraid of being fat and not afraid of telling the truth, whether it was the truth about being fat or the truth about everything else.

Chesterton has a wonderful way of speaking the truth. Truth tends to shock us these days because we are so used to hearing falsehoods, which is why Chesterton’s truths come off as paradoxes. He says, “Truth is stranger than fiction because we have made fiction to suit ourselves…However wild I make my fictitious examples, the truth is always wilder. It does not seem possible to keep up with the exuberant idiocy of things as they really are to-day. Whatever occurs to me as ridiculous has always occurred to somebody else as wise.”

And though Chesterton dabbled in fiction, he earned his daily bread writing as a journalist, the kind of writer everyone relies on even if they don’t think he’s reliable. He says the educated man reads the newspaper, but the truly educated man does not believe the newspaper after he reads it.

And Chesterton says that legend is what everyone in the village believes, but history is what the one person who writes it down believes. And he’s usually a crank.

Chesterton’s approach to history, and to religion, just like his approach to fiction and journalism, is creative and refreshing and provocative and gets us to do the thing we least like doing: the thing called thinking. He does this in his book The Everlasting Man, where he offers a different set of categories than the standard grid used for comparative religion and the development of civilization, four strata that cut across the vertical columns and are sometimes present at the same time within each epoch, sometimes even within each individual. The categories are God, the gods, the demons, and the philosophers. God is the ultimate force behind the universe, but not a mere force, a personality: the one who provides meaning, because there cannot be meaning without someone to mean it. But when God has been forgotten, as he so often is, there come the gods, the mythologies, the imaginative attempts to give meaning, to tell the human story over again, with its heroes and heartaches, its adventures, its loves, its battles, its living and dying, its ache for the eternal. Then there are the demons, who represent shortcuts to pleasure, who represent the decay of virtue and the fascination with evil, when men grow weary in well-doing, when men do things not because they mistakenly think they are good but because they know they are bad. And then the philosophers, who attempt to harness reality with the great gift of reason. It would almost be enough. Except it’s not enough.

Chesterton says that when Christ stepped on to the stage, history changed entirely. Christ stepped into a world populated with many gods, and yet he was a character utterly different from any character in mythology. It was only the Gospel that “met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.” When Christ set up his Church, he brought together theology and philosophy for the first time. He also stepped into a world full of demons. And he cast them out. On one notable occasion, he cast them into a herd of swine.

Paganism ended in Christianity. As the old pagan civilization fell apart, but before a new Christian civilization was established, the world passed through a period of almost no civilization, a time known as the Dark Ages, when barbarian tribes ran wantonly, men who were ruled only by their appetite, who did not build new things but only destroyed old things.

But they were defeated. They were defeated by legendary figures such as King Arthur and historical figures such as King Alfred the Great. And when Christian civilization rose from the ruins of the Dark Ages, it established great cities. It built universities, hospitals, cathedrals, and gave the world magnificent art and music and literature.

In the last few centuries, however, we have watched the decline of Christian civilization. And a hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton predicted the coming of a New Dark Ages.

In his epic Ballad of the White Horse, Chesterton has King Alfred the Great prophesy about the return of the barbarian, but a new sort of barbarian, who would destroy our institutions not with brute force but with intellectual vandalism: