Bigger on the Inside

So I ran across this Chesterton quote while reading Fr. James Schall’s “The Satisfied Crocodile”

“People Talk much of the quarrel between science and relation; but the deepest difference is that the individual is so much bigger than the average, that the inside of life is much larger than the outside.”

The Schall essay is referencing the idea that there are no ordinary people as C.S. Lewis contended and of course G.K. Chesterton.

As a Doctor Who fan, this obviously set me thinking with the whole “bigger on the inside”. So I looked up the source of the quote, which is the “Illustrated London News ”The Idea of Separation of Sense of Separateness Oct 24, 1908″

Along the way I found another reference to the idea in Chesterton’s “The Catholic Church and Conversion.”

“At the last moment of all, the convert often feels as if he were looking through a leper’s window. He is looking through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it; but it is an opening that looks towards the Altar. Only, when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is
much larger inside than it is outside.”

And following another rabbit hole I came across this:

Anthony Coburn wrote the first ever Doctor Who story, “An Unearthly Child.” His subsequent relationship with the show was a tad tempestuous but his influence was significant. It was Coburn who insisted on the TARDIS being a police box (and possibly even invented the acronym), and it was Coburn who made Susan the Doctor’s granddaughter. Coburn was also a committed Roman Catholic. He was even a street preacher. His faith shaped the naming of certain characters (Ian Chesterton after the famous Catholic author, G.K. Chesterton), as well as the character of the Doctor himself. In DWM #467, his son Stef writes: “The character of the Doctor was based on [Anthony’s] cultural hero, (Christian missionary) St. Paul. Like the Doctor, St. Paul was supposedly a learned man. … Paul is a Roman citizen, in the same way the Doctor is a citizen of some other society.”

Although for Chesterton I suspect the TARDIS would have to be bigger on the inside for him by necessity.