Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton, John Lane Co, 1908, reprinted by Ignatius Press, 1995
In G.K. Chesterton’s masterpiece, Orthodoxy, he changes viewpoints by looking at the basics in life in a new/old way. He alters our perceptions of reality so that we both accept and love the age-old truths of the Catholic Church. He causes us to think in a new way about the old.
Chesterton himself calls the book a kind of sloppy autobiography. It was his experience that he was trying to find a new religion, but instead, found it had already been around for 2000 years. He says he had received complaints that his book Heretics was negative. Orthodoxy is Chesterton’s positive answer to these complaints. The format of the book is riddles and the answers to them.
The main question in the book is how we can be astounded by the world but remain comfortable in it. Faith solves this puzzle and satisfies this need. Chesterton analyzes the word romance, which he calls the answer to the human dilemma. He sees that it contains the word Rome, and that indicates the ultimate answer. To Chesterton, however, the imaginative life is primary to solving life’s problems. He illustrates the importance of the imagination by means of several paradoxes. He calls it the “life of practical romance” and “something strange” combined with “something secure.”
With Chesterton, it’s not just using clever phrases, but attempts to search for the truth. He likens himself to an explorer who found what was previously discovered. He tried to be original, but only “invented” orthodoxy. The other philosophies and beliefs in the world are only copies of the real religion. When he pasted together his own special religion, he was amazed to discover he had found Christian orthodoxy. For Chesterton, the Christian theology that comes from the Apostle’s Creed, is the best basis for living an ethical and proper life.
A friend of Chesterton’s said to him about an acquaintance of theirs, “He will get on; he believes in himself.” But unfortunately this doesn’t wash with Chesterton, who reminds us that asylums and prisons contain many people who believe in themselves.
The ancients believed there was right and wrong, and that there were ways of being cleansed of wrong. In today’s world, people deny “not the water, but deny the dirt.” According to Chesterton, original sin is the only one that can be proved. Modern thinking does away with sin, but not with insanity. It takes a normal person to understand that insanity is unusual. The insane person thinks he is certainly ordinary, and even commonplace.
The modern world has turned imagination around. Now, it’s considered hazy and unreliable, only scientists are considered the guardians of truth. But actually, poets do not lose their minds, while mathematicians do. Reason causes madness, not imagination. Those poets, who were exceptions and did became insane, had a rational problem. “Poetry is sane because if floats easily in an infinite sea,” says Chesterton. It’s trying to understand everything that puts the stress on the mind.
Insane people have lost everything but keep reason. An insane person’s mind “moves in a perfect but narrow circle.” It’s very complete, but just not large enough. The smallness is a spiritual lack. Chesterton recommends not arguing with a person of such a mind, but trying to open up the wider world for that person. To be sane, it’s necessary to make oneself smaller and the world larger, which is more proportionate to the truth of life. Perspective is important in this.
A person who is ill must want to attain health, not only truth. In order to be saved, the will must be used. Reason, will only take one in the same circular direction with the same old argument. This is the prison of just one idea.
The same problem infects modern intellectuals. They take one idea and carry it too far. Materialism, for instance, is a simple concept. It includes everything, but leaves everything out as well. If you put modern suppositions in the perspective of whether they effect mental health or not, the modern idea of materialism is like the insane person. This philosophy limits and shrinks reality. It narrows because it can’t include anything spiritual. The Christian can and does include the material universe, and so has both spiritual and physical worlds to wonder at and delight in.
Materialism claims free thought as its basis, but it really restricts free will. Materialistic fatalism says to be moral and ethical is to be enslaved. This is a species of determinism. Free will is thrown out and so no one can commit either good or bad deeds.
The secret of mysticism is that you can understand everything by the aid of what you do not understand. The cross means mystery and health. The cross can go forever and does not have to change its shape. A circle is fixed. The circle of the moon has no light of its own, and is the actual symbol of insanity or lunacy.
The sun is the same as mysticism. It is the center of life but we can’t look directly at it. So, we see it as something both brilliant and not entirely clear. The moon is clear and very reasonable, but Chesterton calls it “the mother of lunatics” that has given them their name.
The virtues were dismissed, along with vices, after the Reformation. The virtues belong together, and become distorted when they are not understood as a whole. The Christian virtue of humility consists of a person making the world large by making himself small. Now, the emphasis is on the opposite. Man asserts himself, not God. Skeptics doubt the truth; they have a false humility. The irony is that, in destroying the authority of God, these doubters destroyed the authority of man.
The world of today has a false theory of progress. There are no basic standards now, and there must be standards in order to have progress.
Modern man rejects the doctrine of free will. But there is a will functioning even in the denial of it. The will itself doesn’t provide any reason for choosing one action over another. Chesterton reminds us that “the essence of will is that it is particular.” The will doesn’t enlarge, but narrows. Anything done chooses one and eliminates the others.
Art is the very definition of limitation. A very good example of pure will is art, with its intrinsic limitations.
Chesterton assigns great importance to tradition, which he calls “the democracy of the dead.” By honoring tradition, we are “giving votes to our ancestors.”
In the stories of fairyland of his childhood, Chesterton recalls that happiness was the result of not doing something. The prince and the princess will be happy if they do not cross the bridge or climb the red mountain. In the stories, it is not always apparent why they cannot do it. But Chesterton says that they were given so much else that they never minded the restrictions. That’s the way Chesterton’s childhood was. He was always happy with his life, and never worried about the things he couldn’t do.
Modern thought is contrary to two of the most important lessons Chesterton learned in the nursery. Number 1: it’s an amazing world. Number 2: the particular joys you have been given are the source of the best kind of happiness.
In Chesterton’s worldview, everything on earth can be perceived as though it all was rescued from a shipwreck. It’s possible to look at every ordinary object as something that was saved from being lost, and that it is amazing that this or that particular thing exists in our world. According to Chesterton, “Any man in the street is a great might-not-have-been.” All that is ordinary is extraordinary.
That a dogma can be believed in certain times and not in others is another conclusion of modern thinking. That is like saying you can believe in a dogma on Tuesday, but not on Friday.
Christianity was the answer to a conundrum. The Roman pagans were “unselfish egotists.” They had no passion about the meaning of life. They were turned inward, and Chesterton says that if you worship the god inside, then you wind up worshipping your own self. It’s not the inner light but the outer light that leads to truth.
Any natural religion morphs into an unnatural religion. Pursuing health becomes unhealthy. To appropriately appreciate nature, it’s important to revel in it, but not to worship it. The Stoics of antiquity were the same as those of today, they enjoyed worldly pleasures, but had no conception of the universe beyond that. Christianity answered the problem; it separated God from the universe.
Transcendence has to be metaphysical because humans have to use words to describe it. Theism tells us that God is a creator. Creation means separation. That same principle is at work in a birth or the making of a poem. When He created the world God fashioned a play, but the actors in it did not do their part well. Christians are happy with the created world, but know that they need to change it as well.
In his earlier life, as Chesterton came to these aforementioned conclusions, he realized that they fit exactly into the Christian worldview. Everything he knew fit and so did everything else. When he found that one part was correct, the whole world became interconnected and meaningful. He had been right in his pre-Christian suppositions and conclusions.
The earlier reason he had for optimism shows itself to be really the opposite. Optimists focused on fitting into the world; Christians know that the world is not the proper home of human beings, and so know they will never fit perfectly in it.
The everyday world we experience is just beyond reason. Chesterton gives examples of the duplication of the human body – two eyes, arms, legs, etc. But if a person then deduces that humans have two hearts, he or she will be wrong. Christianity understands this, and has many examples of being just beyond the rational, such as miracles.
Faith is complex, but this only adds to the riches of faith. The complexity is like a key, which works in the lock not because it is simple, but because it is the right one. Chesterton had another thought on the complexity of the faith: “All roads lead to Rome.” Some may take the wrong road and not get there on time.
It was the heretics that lead him to Christianity. None of the important modern agnostics made any sense to him. He saw that Christianity was attacked from many sides for many opposite reasons. The church was too stern; it was too soft. It was too optimistic; it was too pessimistic. It was too plain, and at the same time, too elaborate. What then was Christianity? Could it be all these opposites? What was the true nature of this oddly shaped entity? What is this 2000 year old organism that has never been right?
Chesterton then came to the conclusion that people who were neither happy nor religious probably weren’t the ones to judge either happiness or religion. Those who criticized the Church were placing their own pathologies up against the Church. Their subjective judgments were made to look objective but they were not.
The pagans believed that virtue was a matter of balance, not doing either extreme but living moderately in the middle. The Christian thinks that virtue is the collision of two opposites which are ostensibly in conflict. Courage, for instance, is to save your life by preparing to lose it. In Chesterton’s words, it combines “a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying.”
Orthodox Christian theology says Jesus was absolutely man and absolutely God. Truth is a paradox. A Christian will love life deeply but will not be afraid to die. These limits are shown by the difference between a martyr and a suicide. A martyr will be in love with life, but will die willingly. A suicide is willing to die, but out of hatred for life. Suicide is the worst sin, because those who commit suicide hate both themselves and the world.
Remember though, in considering the suicide, that Christianity separates the crime from the criminal. It hates the sin, but loves the sinner.
The accepted wisdom is that the modern world is busy. Not true, according to Chesterton. All the bustle of traffic merely signifies that people are lazy. People would truly be busy if they were walking. It’s a similar story with long, scientific words. A sentence composed of long words leaves the mind un-exercised. Short words are more difficult because they require thinking.
There is a myth that says that religions are superficially different but the same in basics. The truth falls on the opposite side. Religions are similar in practice but very different in basic beliefs. Only Christians are concerned with a story. They see man at the crossroads, and able to go one way or the other. A person’s journey to a decision is a like a novel or a short story. The sun doesn’t change, but the story can because of the free will of its creator. The story of Christianity is the only one in which courage is part of the Creator. Christ’s humanity, joined to his divinity, overcome fear in the Garden of Gethsemane.
If atheists chose a god, they will find only one who had doubted. Chesterton sees orthodoxy as the “natural fountain of revolution and reform.” The Church, says Chesterton, is a “guardian of liberty, innovation, and advance.” The Church has a God who became man. Chesterton found the moral milieu for this to be common sense while that which was against it to be common nonsense. He believes because of the “enormous accumulation of small but salient facts.” He finds the evidence to be consistent. The “million facts all flowing one way” are definitive for Chesterton.
There are three reasons Chesterton sees for why moderns have left the Church. They think:
1) Men are merely animals
2) The origin of religion is fear
3) The Church spreads unhappiness
The problem is that none of these are true. Chesterton goes into explanations of why this is so. And as he explains them away, he presents the truth, which is the opposite of each of these three. It was the Incarnation that gave dignity to mankind, confirmed the tradition of happiness at the beginning of the race, and provided human joy for all. And it is the church that continues the story of Jesus through time.