Planet of the Apes Accidentally Explained My Favourite Book

G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man is probably my favorite book. I’m reading through it again right now, and I’ve always had a hard time explaining to people exactly why I love it so much.

There are plenty of ideas in it I could point to, but there is something Chesterton does throughout the book that is harder to describe. He takes things that have become completely ordinary to us and somehow makes them strange again. He makes you stop looking at humanity from the inside, where everything we do seems perfectly normal, and asks you to look at Man almost as if you had never encountered him before.

Recently, I also watched the Planet of the Apes movies for the first time. I know, I’m late to the party. I expected to enjoy them, but I definitely didn’t expect Caesar to finally give me a way to explain why I love Chesterton.

The connection hit me during a scene in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar has been taken away from the home where he grew up and placed in the primate shelter. He is surrounded by concrete walls in this dark, artificial environment that looks strangely like a cave.

And Caesar draws a window on the wall.

That was the moment.

I immediately thought, Chesterton’s caveman.

One of my favorite arguments in The Everlasting Man begins with something incredibly simple: prehistoric cave paintings. We’ve all seen them in history books, and because we’re familiar with them, there is nothing particularly shocking about them anymore. Ancient people painted animals on cave walls. Okay. We move on.

Chesterton refuses to move on.

He basically says: wait. Look at this again.

The animal never painted the man. The deer did not make a picture of the hunter. But the hunter made a picture of the deer.

And now here was Caesar.

The whole premise of the movie is that something unprecedented is happening to an animal. Caesar is becoming something different from the apes around him, and one of the ways the movie shows us this is by putting him inside something that looks remarkably like a cave and having him draw on the wall.

I couldn’t get over it.

This is part of what Chesterton is pushing back against when he talks about the evolutionary story of humanity. If you arrange the development of life into a smooth progression—animal, animal, animal, primitive man, modern man—it can all start to look fairly ordinary. Man becomes another stage in a biological process and, if we aren't careful, we can become so focused on explaining where he came from that we forget to stop and look at what actually showed up.

I’m a Christian and a creationist. I believe humanity was created by God and that human beings uniquely bear the image of God. I don't believe evolution is the explanation for where Man came from.

But that is part of why I enjoy Chesterton’s argument so much. He is willing to look at the evolutionary account and essentially say, “Fine, but stop looking at your diagram for a minute and look at the thing you are trying to explain.”

Look at the creature standing in the cave.

Man paints. Man tells stories. He buries his dead. He makes laws and then argues about whether those laws are just. He makes music. He worships. He laughs. He will sacrifice himself for things he cannot see or touch. He looks up at the universe and asks why any of it exists in the first place.

Chesterton’s point isn’t simply that humans are smarter than other creatures. It is that Man is strange, and maybe we have lived with ourselves for so long that we have stopped noticing.

And Christianity doesn't leave that strangeness unexplained.

Man is strange because Man was made differently. We were made in the image of God. We are creatures, absolutely, but we are creatures who were made to know our Creator, to exercise responsibility over creation, to recognize good and evil, to create, to love, to worship and to live in relationship with God and with one another.

For me, that isn't an awkward religious answer we have to attach to the end of the mystery. It is part of the beauty of Christianity. It actually explains why the mystery is there.

So there I was, watching an ape draw on the wall of his cave, and once I saw the connection I couldn’t stop seeing it throughout the movies.

There is a funny irony at the heart of Planet of the Apes. On the surface, you could easily read the whole premise as a challenge to the idea that humanity is special. We think we’re unique, but what if another species became as intelligent as we are? What if apes could speak, organize themselves, overthrow us and eventually build their own civilization?

Fair enough.

But then watch what the movies actually have to do to convince us that these apes are no longer just animals.

They start giving them all of the strange characteristics Chesterton notices in Man.

Caesar draws. Then he speaks. The apes form families and communities. They make moral judgments. They establish laws. They preserve memories. They experience loyalty and betrayal. They wrestle with justice, revenge and mercy. Eventually they begin building something that looks remarkably like civilization.

The movies seem to blur the line between Man and animal, and then almost immediately begin recreating that line inside the apes themselves.

That made Caesar’s famous “No” land differently for me too. Obviously it is shocking because an ape suddenly speaks, but the power of the scene isn't simply that Caesar has acquired vocabulary. If Caesar’s first word had been “banana,” it would have been scientifically astonishing, but it wouldn't have been the same scene.

He says, “No.”

He isn't just communicating something he wants. He is looking at what is happening to him and judging it. He is saying that what is happening is not what ought to be happening.

That is different.

And then, while all of this is happening to the apes, something almost exactly opposite is happening to humanity. Human civilization is collapsing. Institutions disappear. Technology fades. Communities fracture. Eventually even language itself begins to disappear.

The two species are almost passing each other. The apes are moving from animal life toward civilization while humans are moving from civilization toward something much more primitive.

At some point I realized the question I was interested in wasn't really, “Which species gets to rule the planet?”

It was, what does it actually mean to be human?

The conflict between Caesar and Koba made that question even more interesting to me. Koba is intelligent. His problem isn't a lack of intelligence. He has also suffered horribly at the hands of humans, so his hatred doesn't come from nowhere. His grievance is real. The problem is that eventually his grievance becomes the way he sees everything.

Humans once had power over the apes and abused it. Now the apes have power, and Koba wants to turn that power back against the humans.

But I don't think that actually solves the problem.

There is a way of talking about liberation that makes it sound as though the great human problem is fundamentally one of power: find the system of oppression, expose who benefits from it, dismantle it, and liberation will follow.

But dismantling the system is not the same thing as building a good society.

Koba can overthrow the humans. He can expose their cruelty. He can reverse the hierarchy. But none of that tells him what he should do once he has power.

And that is where the whole idea of liberation by dismantling power starts to break down for me. You eventually have to build something. You eventually have to decide what is good and what is evil. You have to say what should be protected, what should be prohibited, what children should be taught, what authority is for, what justice requires and whether there are things worth sacrificing yourself to preserve.

You cannot dismantle your way into a good society.

Sooner or later you have to answer the much harder question:

What is society actually for?

That is the question Caesar has to answer.

The apes don't just need freedom from humans. They need to figure out what kind of society they are going to build once they have it. What is justice? When should power be restrained? What do we owe each other? What do we do with our enemies? Is mercy weakness? What happens when one of our own becomes evil?

Caesar’s real achievement isn't creating a society of intelligent apes. It is trying to create a good society of intelligent apes.

And Christianity has something to say here too, because Christianity does not merely tell us what we need to be liberated from. It tells us what human beings are for.

We were made for God and for one another. Freedom is not simply the absence of restraint or the destruction of authority. Power isn't inherently evil; it has to be ordered toward the good. Authority can be abused, obviously, but the answer to abusive authority cannot simply be the destruction of authority itself. Parents still have to raise children. Leaders still have to lead. Communities still have to make judgments. Somebody eventually has to say, “This is good. This is worth protecting. This is worth passing on.”

This is where I started to realize just how far the Chesterton connection went. Planet of the Apes imagines the disappearance of human civilization, but it can't seem to imagine a meaningful civilization without rediscovering the things that made humanity so peculiar in the first place.

Language comes back. Family comes back. Law comes back. Moral responsibility, story, sacrifice, memory—they all come back.

The movies remove Homo sapiens from the center of the story, and then almost accidentally reinvent Man.

And there was one more part of all this that stuck with me: civilization is much more fragile than we like to think.

When we think about civilization, we tend to think about what it has built. Roads, buildings, governments, schools, electricity, technology. But Caesar's world made me think about how much of civilization is actually invisible.

A civilization has to know who “we” are. It has to have some idea of what we owe each other, what we must never do even when it would benefit us, what is worth sacrificing for, and what we need to pass on to the people who come after us.

And this is where I think Christians need to recover some confidence.

We live in a culture that is very comfortable teaching people to question what they have inherited, and sometimes that questioning is necessary. Some things should be challenged. Some traditions are wrong. Some systems really do need to change.

But we cannot disciple the next generation only to dismantle.

We also have to teach them that some things are true.

Some things are good.

Some things are beautiful.

Some things are worth building.

Some things are worth protecting.

And some things are worth handing to your children and saying, “Do not lose this.”

Because not every set of values produces the same kind of person, and not every vision of society allows this strange creature called Man to flourish.

If Chesterton is right that Man is genuinely peculiar, and if Christianity is right about why—that human beings bear the image of God—then we cannot be indifferent about the kind of society we create. A society built on a false understanding of Man will eventually become inhuman, no matter how often it uses the language of liberation.

Caesar can't just give the apes infrastructure. He has to give them an inheritance.

And somehow they have to remember it.

That might be one of the most biblical ideas I found hiding in these movies.

The book of Judges shows what happens when a people forget. Its story follows a repeating cycle. Israel turns away from God. They suffer under oppression. They cry out for help. God raises up a judge to deliver them. For a while, the people return to God. Then that generation dies, the next generation forgets what God has done, and the cycle begins again.

The pattern is simple: rebellion, suffering, rescue, forgetfulness, and rebellion again.

One generation suffers and learns something through that suffering. They turn what they learned into laws, traditions and stories. Their children inherit those things, but eventually it becomes possible to inherit the rule without remembering the reason for it. Once you forget the story behind the commandment, the commandment can start to look arbitrary.

Then eventually somebody breaks it and discovers the hard way why it was there.

There is a reason Scripture is constantly telling people to remember. Remember where you came from. Remember what God did. Tell your children. Pass the story down.

We forget remarkably quickly.

And as a Christian—and especially as a Minister—that lands differently for me.

Discipleship isn't simply teaching our children a collection of Christian 'rules' and hoping they continue following them. We have to give them the story that makes sense of the 'rules'. We have to teach them what Man is, what Man is for, who made him, why goodness is actually good, why freedom needs truth, why love sometimes requires restraint, and why there are things in this world worth preserving even when the culture around them has forgotten why they matter.

Otherwise we hand them commandments without memory.

And eventually commandments without memory start to look like arbitrary restrictions waiting to be dismantled.

I think this finally gets at why I love The Everlasting Man so much.

Chesterton makes me look again.

Of course humans paint. Of course we tell stories. Of course we bury our dead. Of course we argue about justice. Of course we build civilizations. Of course we worship.

But why “of course”?

There is nothing ordinary about any of this.

Christianity gives me an answer that I find not only convincing, but beautiful.

Man is not an inexplicable accident of nature. Man was created. We bear the image of God. We were made to know Him, to love, to create, to cultivate, to exercise responsibility, to recognize the good and to hand that good on to those who come after us.

That means Christians should not be embarrassed to stand for something. Not every inherited value is good simply because it is old, and not every change is bad simply because it is new. But neither should we accept the idea that progress consists of endlessly dismantling whatever came before us.

Eventually somebody has to build.

Somebody has to remember.

Somebody has to tell the children why the wall was there in the first place.

I sat down to watch Planet of the Apes for the first time expecting a really good science-fiction movie about intelligent apes taking over the world. I did not expect to find one of the best illustrations I've ever encountered for why my favorite book has stayed with me.

But there was Caesar, sitting in his concrete cave, drawing a window on the wall.

And suddenly I was back in Chesterton’s cave.

The whole irony of these movies is that they imagine a world where humanity loses its place, but in order to make the creatures who replace us truly matter, they slowly teach them to create, speak, love, judge, remember, sacrifice, make laws, build communities and wrestle with good and evil.

They get rid of humanity.

And somehow they rediscover Man.

And maybe the thing Christians need to remember is that it isn't enough for us to spend our lives complaining about everything being torn down. We have been given something to build, something to preserve, and something to hand to our children.

Because if Man really is the strange creature Chesterton saw standing in that cave, and if Christianity is right that his strangeness comes from bearing the image of God, then the question isn't merely what kind of society will give Man the most freedom.

It is what kind of society will help Man become what he was created to be.

Maybe that is finally how I explain why I love The Everlasting Man.

It took an ape drawing on the wall of a cave for me to figure it out.