[gingerrr]

To extend the original metaphor - your mouth doesn't stay shut forever, or you starve. So the idea is more to sink your brain or teeth into substantive thoughts, as you encounter them. It's not about closing your mind/mouth around a new dogma, but about exercising them for nutrition not for pleasure/vice (or letting them atrophy).

I think the "re-closing" of the mind here more represents fitting new information into a new holistic, consistent worldview. New information would obviously require that exercise again.

Chesterton is simply arguing against allowing yourself to be buffeted by the winds of thought trend, to the point you have no center.

[throw__away7391]

Well it's a bad one. It isn't even a metaphor really, it's a word game relying on particulars of the English language, and it breaks down quite quickly as you could just as easily express the exact opposite point with slightly different phrasing, e.g. you need new food each day. I guess you could print it on a coaster to put your "eat pray love" mug on.

[gingerrr]

> It isn't even a metaphor really, it's a word game relying on particulars of the English language

It's absolutely a metaphor, just because you didn't understand it doesn't change the meaning the author conveyed. It's written in English, I'm not sure what point you think you are making by pointing that out.

> you could just as easily express the exact opposite point

So you didn't read my comment you replied to? You need new nutritive food each day, not junk or empty calories - the metaphor covers this exact scenario.

When you're eating every day do you just grab literally the first thing at hand and stuff your face until you're full? Or do you make conscious choices about what to put in your body?

If you're in the first camp you may not understand this metaphor - it's for people who consciously consume, both food and thoughts. If you mindlessly scroll and ideate, sorry you're the target of Chesterton's criticism - that doesn't make his metaphor bad, it just makes his argument valid.

> I guess you could print it on a coaster to put your "eat pray love" mug on

The irony, considering you're engaging with this quote at the same shallow level you claim to criticize.

G.K. Chesterton has an entire body of intellectual work consistent with the quote and metaphor extension I've done above - but you've decided to tilt at the windmill of a pithy quote as if it's synecdoche.

[throw__away7391]

> G.K. Chesterton has an entire body of intellectual work

As a Christian apologist. His views were a foregone conclusion. No one who engages in such games deserves to be taken seriously.

This is completely "consistent" at least with so-called "Christian intellectuals", as they want other people to be "open minded" to their proselytizing while they themselves remain completely closed to the even possibility that they're completely wrong. They do not engage in good faith and see no problems with this because they consider their ultimate aims more important.

[gingerrr]

His arguments against absolute open-mindedness weren't grounded in discussions of his faith - even just the full version of his quote shows that, it was in reply to a metaphor for theory of mind his friend told him:

"For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever."

Other variations of the quote he told included an addendum: "The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise it is more akin to a sewer, taking in all things equally."

Neither of those relate to grounding his epistemology in Catholicism.

While I definitely agree his Christian apologia means a heavy dose of salt with intellectual claims, he's not even arguing for a moral center in this metaphor. Simply an intellectual self, to not be a gaping maw of consumption, as you wouldn't be physically.

Discernment with respect to ideas you're willing to entertain isn't exclusively the domain of religion, as far as I'm aware.