Orthodoxy (1908)

Although Chesterton included many references to his contemporaries and to the issues of his day, most of them now obscure, the clarity of his writing and the force of his argument made this an interesting and surprising read for me. ( )

Orthodoxy : The Classic Account of a Remarkable Christian Experience (The Wheaton Literary Series) by G.K. Chesterton (?)

G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is a most unorthodox defense of Christian orthodoxy. Or is it, as it sometimes seems, an orthodox defense of Christian unorthodoxy? (I trust that Chesterton, that lover of paradox, would not begrudge me one of my own at his expense). If you know Chesterton, you know that he will not be pinned down without a fight. He is a man of manifest and muscular opinions—he musters those opinions, and delights in ordering them to strike, to dissipate, to retreat, to regroup, and to reform in new ranks over the course of a single paragraph. You never know what Chesterton will next say, as you never know what Proteus will next be. This is not because Chesterton holds his views lightly (again, he holds them with great force), but because the near-irresistible strength of his personality and style only partially overwhelms the countervailing force of reason, which, left to its own devices, would send his incompatible contentions hurtling to the cosmic antipodes in a blast of annihilatory logic. Chesterton’s verdicts are in constant flux, because that’s the only way for them to stand still. They exhibit a fractal structure; every argument, upon inspection, is found to be comprised of smaller, identical arguments, each one pointing in the opposite direction. He is an unadulterated genius, an exemplary stylist of English prose, and what’s more (as a purely practical matter), has his heart almost unfailingly in the right place. And that, dear reader, is precisely why you must watch him like a hawk.

You can learn a lot about a philosophizer by attending to what he styles a “self-contradiction” (that is, a supposed absurdity urged by his opponents), and what he styles a “paradox” (that is, a supposed absurdity urged by himself). So, for example, it is a self-contradiction when the critics of Christianity reproached it…

…with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was being abused for being too plain and for being too colored… (p. 81)

…whereas it is a mere paradox when Chesterton himself asserts:

In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. (p. 86)

This is self-evidently a game played with loaded dice. It would be easy and pointless to multiply examples—Orthodoxy veritably writhes with them. But Chesterton’s steadfast partiality and illogic are not what ultimately make Orthodoxy such an exercise in insipidity. What is Christianity, anyway? You would not believe Chesterton’s answer if I did not quote it verbatim:

Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis. (p. 139)

This is unrecognizable. If that’s all Christianity is, then it’s hardly worth the skeptic’s time to attack; sadder still, it’s hardly worth the Christian’s trouble to defend. This is bald, unmitigated mysticism—defensible, perhaps, in its own right—but to call it (orthodox) Christianity is laughable. The most execrable thing, however, is not Chesterton’s audacity in pronouncing this doctrine to be orthodox—rather, it’s the timorous acquiescence of generations of actual orthodox Christians, who have hypocritically found convenient cover in pretending that Chesterton was marshalling his formidable intellectual talents on behalf of their own quite distinguishable beliefs.

To be sure, the orthodox Christian is likely to recognize some of her private spiritual experience in Chesterton, but I doubt she will recognize much of her avowed religious creed. There is, for example, very little Christ in Chesterton’s version of Christian orthodoxy. Most of the biblical underpinnings of his theology (Eden, The Fall, and Original Sin, most prominently) derive from Old Testament sources. The suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ; universal atonement for human sins; the doctrine of the Trinity; these are all mentioned, but only tangentially. They are in no sense crucial to the vision of Christian orthodoxy that Chesterton presents. The only identifiable thing about the Christian mythos that is truly essential to Chesterton’s Christianity is that, as a contingent, historical matter, the Christian mythos is the set of stories out of which the Christian Church happened to emerge and around which it coalesced. With the bludgeon of his near-irresistible rhetoric, however, I have no doubt that Chesterton could just as easily have made the case that any other religious tradition answered the demands of his youthful, searching mysticism—as, with sufficient determination, any square peg can be made to fit any round hole.

Come to that, it must have felt terribly convenient, having been a bit of a religious dissident in his youth, for Chesterton to discover that all it took was some sophistry to accommodate Christianity to his own private, spiritual longings. What a relief that the one true religion, the one that he had always felt right down in the marrow of his mystic little bones, turned out to be precisely the one most widely practiced, and least dangerous to be avowed in his own homeland! What a comfort, to commune with the martyred saints, while risking only the jeers and giggles of a few effete materialists!

G. K. Chesterton was a brilliant figure who for nearly a century has loomed large in the world of Christian Apologetics. Though one of his most famous fans, C. S. Lewis, has overtaken him in prominence as an apologist, or perhaps because of this, Chesterton's work is well worth reading.

In his book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton examines the evidences for the Christian faith via looking at how the supposed “evidence” against Christianity made little sense to him as he researched the issues as a young man. Up front, he apologizes for the largely autobiographical nature of the volume, while explaining that this is the only way he knows how to truly proceed.

Chesterton argues that the totality of experiences, ideas, evidences, and so forth, that make up a man's beliefs are, in large part, inseparable from those beliefs. To leave out these pieces of the puzzle, these autobiographical elements, leaves us with disparate philosophical ramblings that really explain nothing at all. So with this in mind, Chesterton explains in detail how he went from an agnostic to a Christian, by way of detailing the blessings of the Church, and the defects of her critics and of other religious and philosophical systems.

Such an approach seems like it may be very narcissistic on Chesterton's part, and so won't work at all. On the contrary, it is quite brilliant. Chesterton actually focuses very little on himself, except for as a vehicle for expounding his ideas. While we do gain some insights into Chesterton the man, they are always strongly intertwined with the story of his faith in Christ Our Lord, and the reasons he came to that faith.

While this work is overall quite brilliant, there are some parts of the book one may find annoying. Chesterton takes some very gratuitous potshots against Calvinism and Protestants to an extent where I believe not just evangelicals, but even many Catholics may find it to grate on their nerves. But this was, in a strange way, a great blessing of the book for me. Chesterton, for all of his brilliance and the effective way God uses him, was, when he lived, still a sinner saved by grace. We all need Christ, and we all continually have to return to the Father to gain reconciliation with Him for our sins. Even the best of us. Yet, God grants His children forgiveness continuously. What a wondrously merciful God we serve. Granted, this isn't a lesson that the author meant to include in the book, but, by God's grace, it is a lesson the Lord used this book to teach me.

Whether one is looking for a good book on Apologetics, or is just a tad shaky on defending the faith (and in need of some intellectual firepower), this book is worth picking up.

Highly Recommended. ( )

Couldn't get into this. The author makes various assertions and sweeping generalities but I confess I was unable to pin down the flow of his argument. No rating as only 18% read.