Human monstrosity as an explanation, not an insult
I myself was at once worse and better than all things
Pascal offers a useful earlier comparison for the apparently cheerful discovery of human ‘monstrosity’. In the Pensées, fragment 434, human beings combine an aspiration to truth with persistent error; their contradictory condition becomes intelligible through creation and the Fall. Fragment 431 similarly describes humanity as having lost its place, while 433 asks a true religion to explain both human greatness and littleness. Pensées, fragments 431–434.
Chesterton gives this explanatory structure a distinctive emotional result: an account of estrangement restores joy because it explains an experience that assurances of natural fitness had left unexplained. The preceding paragraph explicitly invokes the Fall, so ‘monstrosity’ means a disordered excellence, not merely biological abnormality. This is a comparison of arguments, not evidence that Chesterton borrowed the passage. The Pensées first appeared posthumously in 1670; the inspected English witness is Gutenberg's transcription of a 1958 Dutton edition, whose fragment numbering should not be assumed universal.
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