But then, the Anschluss. And then, Hitler comes to power. With this, his perfect life is shattered. The new Nazi regime demands obeisance and upon conscription, Franz must swear an oath of allegiance to the Führer.

“What do you do when your leaders are evil?” asks Franz, a devout Catholic. He faces a dreadful dilemma. For while he cannot countenance endorsing the Nazi regime, he is not a single man with only his own future to think about. He knows the consequences of his defiance for his family: his wife, Franziska, and their three children would be ostracised by their village and his death would leave them in a dire situation.

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How Franz, a real-life conscientious objector in the Second World War, resolves the dilemma is what fascinates Terrence Malick in A Hidden Life — a film which sees the American director storming back to form. After a spate of what critics have dismissed as indulgent, sprawling cinematic offerings — too short on dialogue, too long on landscape — Malick has returned to plot. The film is still three hours long, and there’s plenty of wind rustling in trees, but this time the story is sufficiently compelling.

What makes the film a masterpiece, however, and not just another gripping Second World War yarn, is something else. The film affords Malick the opportunity to interrogate a philosophical choice that we all face all of the time. A Hidden Life is not just about a uniquely excruciating dilemma. No, Franz’s struggle is an extreme version of a fundamental option continually foisted upon us, in public and in private: do we work out what to do based solely on weighing up the consequences? Or are there times when we should pursue goodness regardless of the outcomes?

G.K. Chesterton said you haven’t understood a heresy until you’ve felt the pull of it. In A Hidden Life, Malick makes us feel the pull of the heresy of the former: making decisions based on consequences alone.

According to this heresy, called ‘consequentialism’ (its pernicious influence on late-modern life is greater than its obscure technical name might suggest), when you’re deciding what to do, all you should be thinking about are the outcomes. No act is right or wrong in itself. It all depends on the circumstances. Indeed, any act could, in a certain context, be considered legitimate.

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The consequentialist resolution of Franz’s dilemma would be easy: swear the oath. Malick makes us feel the pull of this option by convincing us of the futility of Franz’s defiance. Franz lives a hidden life. He is not a leader whose refusal to capitulate might catalyse a rebellion. His martyr’s blood will not be the beginning of a movement. Only a smattering of people will even hear of his death; his story will be consigned to the “short and simple annals of the poor”. From his jailer to his lawyer to his priest, Franz is bombarded with the same questions: “What good is your defiance doing anyone?” “Do you think it will change anything?” “What purpose does it serve?”

And, yet, Franz persists in his defiance, right through to its tragic conclusion. His morality is the opposite of the consequentialist: it is based on integrity alone. This might seem strange to a modern audience, but it was, in fact, the basis of Western understanding of morality until the Enlightenment. An understanding which started with the Greeks.

Malick’s debt in this film to ancient philosophy — before he became a film director, he was an academic philosopher — is undisguised. And in one of the film’s many eloquent and poignant interior monologues (a Malick trope) we hear Franz allude to Socrates’s dictum that “a good man cannot be harmed”. It’s what the Athenian philosopher told the jurors who had just convicted him on the trumped-up charges of corrupting the youth of the city and introducing new Gods.

Socrates refuses to “stoop to servility”, refuses to beg for a more lenient sentence than death. Why? Because he thinks he would lose his integrity. For integrity is the one thing his jurors can’t take from him. The idea is that only you can violate your dignity, harm your soul. Even if you’re persecuted you will not be harmed. This determination to live according to principle regardless of the costs — the opposite of consequentialism — is what I think intrigues Malick in the film.

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Malick is also that rare breed, a Christian filmmaker. From A Thin Red Line to The Tree of Life, his films show him haunted by the question of God’s existence and reconciling that with the reality of evil. And what we see in A Hidden Life is the Socratic determination to live according to principle rooted in Franz’s Catholic faith.

How exactly? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth paints a picture of the moral life as a hidden life. Warning against religious exhibitionism and ostentatious ritual, Christ says:

“When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6, 18).

He who is unseen sees… In Christian theology, living according to principle — the disavowal of consequentialism — is rooted in an assumption that although something may be hidden in human terms, in divine terms it is not. There is an audience for what you do, but it is an audience of one.

Today the consequentialist temptation faces us rather regularly in public life. The politicians for whom the ends justify the means; the radical reforms justifying the nature of the abusive campaign. The officials and generals for whom bombing innocent civilians to lower morale will end a war faster. But, in truth, consequentialism strikes closer to home. Your boss asks you to lie for them, and it seems that the consequences of refusing are worse for everyone. I shy away from confronting my friend’s marital infidelity because I fear the consequences will make things worse. What are we to do?

Live according to principle, and hang the consequences, seems to be Malick’s recommendation. And in saying this, Malick also offers a great encouragement, for he shows Franz experiencing an extraordinary peace when he comes to the decision that there are some things he simply cannot do, some actions he cannot perform.

“Right action,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages, “is freedom from past / And future also.” I think he means that choosing to live according to principle is not only about defying the determinism which says your behaviour is governed by your past. Living according to principle is also about freeing yourself from the responsibility of the future consequences of your action.

To decide there are some convictions you simply won’t override, some things you simply won’t do, is ultimately to relinquish control. With self -limitation comes, paradoxically, a release. Almost an abandonment. Being true to yourself, a burden is lifted.

That lack of amusement has extended to the man’s many admirers over the past weeks, as the Roman Catholic Church rejected the author for the canonisation process partly due to his alleged anti-Semitism. Bishop Peter Doyle, of Northampton, added that there was a lack of a “local cult” and “pattern of personal spirituality”, around the man, but it’s certainly been his writings on the Jews that have caused the greatest resistance.

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Cult or otherwise, there are Chesterton societies and magazines all over the world, and since the 1970s in particular he has been regarded as one of the great Catholic apologists – a man who managed to communicate often tangled theological beliefs with clean and clear popular appeal. American conservative Catholic thinkers are especially dedicated to this English-language writer, seen as one of their own, and their influence in the Vatican under Pope John Paul II helped to further the cause.

It must all seem somewhat esoteric, even obscure, to most observers. Chesterton was who he was and will remain so, hagiographical acknowledgement or otherwise. Yet saint-making still matters, whatever the cynics may say, and to have accepted Chesterton as a saint would have been profoundly controversial. This would have been the Roman Catholic Church placing its highest seal of approval on a man who many believe disliked Jews, at a time when even the most optimistic commentator would agree that the ghoul of anti-Semitism has found new life.

Controversy wouldn’t be new, of course; the entire business of saint-making has always been touchy and messy. The process isn’t supposed to begin until a hiatus of five years after someone’s death and then there has to be evidence of “heroic virtues”, proven miracles, and so on.

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The Roman Catholic Church’s official teaching is that it doesn’t make saints, it merely recognises them, but that’s a little disingenuous. Holy lobbying has become a big business, and one drenched in church politics, which is why different groups back conservative and progressive figures for the process. Whatever the Church may claim, there is a pronounced political and ideological division both in clerical and lay circles.

For example, those who worked to promote the cause of Josemaría Escrivá, founder of the traditionalist Catholic group Opus Dei, came from the opposite side of church politics to those behind the campaign for Óscar Romero, the bishop in El Salvador murdered by a fascist gang for his support of the poor and opposition to the government. But both groups have to be accommodated in a game of ecclesiastical balance.

It’s also why Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II were rushed to the front of the queue – with insufficient consideration of the former’s links to repugnant despots, and the latter’s – whatever his undoubted strengths – alarmingly flaccid response to sexual abuse within the clergy.

Then there are the legions of saints with dubious records, such as local hero Thomas More. He was a martyr for the cause, he was brilliant, but he also personally ordered and supervised the gruesome torture of those who questioned Catholic beliefs. That somewhat inconsistent element to his moral character was conveniently ignored, partly because when he was canonized in 1935, the Papacy was eager to emphasize its status and honour those who agreed with it, and because England was in dire need of some new compatriots confirmed to be in heaven.

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Chesterton is equally problematic, if less tangibly so, and the reason why his treatment has upset many of his devotees is not, for the most part, because they defend anti-Semitism, but because they deny the author of the Father Brown stories, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and volumes of compelling journalism was an anti-Semite in the first place.

Indeed his popularity among Catholic thinkers, and secular conservatives, has grown rather than diminished since his death in 1936, due to his undoubted wit as a writer, and his genuine cleverness and ability to charge through clutter and hypocrisy, like some grand knight of paradox and traditional values. His observations still seem highly relevant: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried” he wrote in ‘The Unfinished Temple’,  in (What’s Wrong with the World, Collected Works, 1910) “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it” (The Everlasting Man, 1925) and “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” (New York Magazine, 1923)

Chesterton’s gift, his charisma if you like, was the ability to be a middleman of intellectual ideas and popular curiosity. He could explain philosophy to the masses, and mass to the educated atheist, could write weekly and sometimes daily newspaper columns that roared with cleverness, and then produce a biography of St. Francis or Charles Dickens that impressed life-long devotees. When he published his life of Thomas Aquinas, the world-renowned Thomist scholar Étienne Gilson was distraught. “For many years I have studied St. Thomas and written on him and now a journalist writes a better book about him than I have!”

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Yet within Chesterton, within the style and the brilliance and the originality, there was something darker. Richard Ingrams, an admirer, put it well when he wrote that he, “shut his eyes to a great deal of the unpleasantness and cruelty in the world, including his own circle.” He was likely referring to his brother Cecil, and to the author and polemicist Hilaire Belloc, who undoubtedly had a major influence on the much gentler and kinder Gilbert Keith.

Cecil Chesterton was a journalist and editor of limited talent, but was revered by his younger sibling. Cecil was obsessed with what he saw as the negative Jewish influence in media and finance; led a vitriolic campaign against the handful of Jewish figures who were involved in the 1912 Marconi Scandal – an early form of insider trading, mostly involving non-Jews – and, with the far more talented Belloc, developed a virtual ideology based on the belief that Jews were alien to British society and a direct threat to its future.

Cecil died at the end of the First World War, through illness rather than combat, and shortly afterwards Chesterton wrote an open letter to the Lord Reading (Rufus Isaacs, the first Jewish Lord Chief Justice of England), as the politician was about to travel to Versailles as part of the British delegation to the peace conference. It’s drenched in anti-Semitism, with references to “the Jewish international”, “alien psychology”, and “Daniel, son of Isaac, Go in peace, but go.”

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But there is much more than letters written in grief, perhaps under the influence of friends. Chesterton may have been led further along a dark path by those around him, but his mingling of misplaced medievalism, English insularity, and instinctive distrust of what he always offensively assumed to be Jewish characteristics, led to his own brand of error and cruelty. Many, though far from all, of his contemporaries may have had prejudices about Jews, and sometimes expressed them, but it was Chesterton’s frequent comments, his attacks and then defence of his position or attempted justification, that singles him out.

In his book A Short History of England, for example, Chesterton praised the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I as the actions of a “tender father of his people”; in his journalism he condemned the British press for opposing the French military and establishment’s anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus affair; and even called for Jews to be forced to wear a form of public identification.

Then there were the clawing vulgarities. In On Lying in Bed and Other Essays: “I am fond of Jews/Jews are fond of money/Never mind of whose. I am fond of Jews/Oh, but when they lose/Damn in all, it’s funny.” And this from The Flying Inn: “Oh I knew a Doctor Gluck/And his nose it had a hook/And his attitudes were anything but Aryan/ So I gave him all the pork that I had, upon a fork/Because I am myself a Vegetarian.”

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His defenders argue that he was a Zionist, but that’s far too facile an analysis. While many at the time who supported the creation of a Jewish state did so because they thought it would lead to Jewish security and dignity, Chesterton was more concerned with what he was convinced was the foreign, un-English nature of the Jewish people. In other words: find them somewhere else to live. This was a natural – an inevitable – consequence of his obsession with what he referred to as “the Jewish question”, and incessant references to “plutocrats” and “financiers” – a vocabulary that would soon become part of the litany of genocide.

The other common defence is that he – and Hilaire Belloc for that matter – were vehemently anti-Nazi. That’s certainly true, though they also cheered for fascism elsewhere, especially when it was wrapped in Catholic nationalism. Chesterton wrote of thousands of Jews being “rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes” by the Nazis, who “beat and bully poor Jews in concentration camps”, and how, “I do indeed despise the Hitlerites.”

He died before the Holocaust was fully implemented, and with his authentic opposition to eugenics and his hatred of what he saw as “Prussian barbarity”, he would likely have been disgusted. But opposition to mass murder and ethnic cleansing doesn’t forgive someone of anti-Semitism, and those who help to create a climate where racist atrocity is permissible share a certain responsibility for its reality.

While the claim might groan in its banality, he certainly did have Jewish friends who he sincerely liked, he was appalled by the idea of Jews being harmed because of who they were, but he also played a game of grimy hide-and-seek around the issue, popping up to provoke and condemn, and then claiming innocence or, as his partisans would claim today, purity of intent. That just won’t do.

I once thought, perhaps with far more sanguinity than was deserved, that when weighed in the balance, GK Chesterton may not have been completely on the wrong side of history – that at least he wasn’t part of the problem, and that when the testing-time came he saw the threat before others were aware. No longer. He may not have been the worst, he may well have changed his mind if he had lived longer, but the damage was done.

As Jew-hatred gains a shockingly new prominence, its proponents look to anybody who offers an intellectual underpinning to their venom. Chesterton, tragically, is one of theirs. No saint he.