Loving God and reversing the Delphic command
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself.
The first clause quotes the opening of the commandment Jesus gives in Matthew 22:37, also found in Luke 10:27; Mark 12:30 and its scriptural source, Deuteronomy 6:5, have an introductory 'And'. In the King James Version the command continues by requiring love with heart, soul and mind. The wording does not identify one Gospel uniquely. The second clause is Chesterton's paradoxical addition, reversing the Delphic injunction to know oneself; it is not another biblical commandment. King James Bible, Matthew 22:37–40; Deuteronomy 6:5; Luke 10:27.
A particularly illuminating comparison is Plato's Phaedrus 229e–230a. Socrates declines to spend his time rationalizing mythical monsters while he remains ignorant of himself. In Benjamin Jowett's translation he invokes the Delphic inscription and asks whether he himself is monstrous or gentler and more divine. Both passages unsettle the assumption that familiar humanity is already understood while fabulous creatures need explaining. But their directions differ: Socrates makes acknowledged ignorance a reason to pursue self-knowledge; Chesterton makes our unmastered identity a continuing source of astonishment. The paragraph's closing claim that art makes us remember our ignorance shows that his 'shalt not' functions as a deliberately startling statement of limitation, rather than an instruction to stop thinking. Plato, Phaedrus, 229e–230a, Jowett translation.
The Bible witness inspected is Project Gutenberg's King James text (the translation first appeared in 1611); the Plato witness is Gutenberg's Jowett translation, not a Greek critical text. Phaedrus is an ancient fourth-century-BCE work, not a modern publication with an ascertainable first-edition date. This comparison establishes an intelligible philosophical contrast, not that Chesterton was specifically borrowing this dialogue.
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