Dear Posterity,
Here we find ourselves at the inaugural literary recommendation of the month, and it is with great pleasure I introduce this month’s selection: Orthodoxy, written by G.K. Chesterton.
Chesterton was a rabble-rousing, quirky fellow who looked as if he’d “survived the Great Potato Famine and was preparing for the next one” (Michael Lewis, Flash Boys). Not as well-known as C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, Chesterton nonetheless played an instrumental role in the atheistic Lewis choosing Christianity. We might say that without Chesterton, there would be no Narnia or Middle-earth.
G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is a whimsical autobiographical series of mental pictures that collectively summarize not whether Christianity is believable, but how he came to believe in it.
In that sense, Orthodoxy is written as a riddle…a riddle composed of countless bewildering anomalies that seemed to him to repeat in surprising coincidences. “One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.” Observed by Chesterton over the course of his life, these mysteries—spanning philosophy, nature, economics, politics, and religion—could never be solved with a satisfying explanation. That is, until he encountered Christianity. In one fell swoop, Christian Theology startled Chesterton with its impossibly glorious answer, and suddenly satisfied every one of his lifetime speculations. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or in his words, he could hear “bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief.”
Chesterton excitedly organized his fundamental ideas into a working framework…only to startlingly discover Christianity had already discovered them. “As usual, Christianity had been there before me. The whole history of my Utopia has the same amusing sadness. I was always rushing out of my architectural study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old,” remarks Chesterton.
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Orthodoxy is not an apologetic, but a description of Chesterton’s own growth in spiritual certainty. The more he saw the arguments against Christianity, the less he thought of them. It was Huxley, Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”), and atheist Charles Bradlaugh who brought him back to orthodox theology. They sowed in his mind the first wild doubts of doubt.
For example, Chesterton observed (as an agnostic) that Christianity must be an extraordinary thing if it was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons:
How could Christianity be timid, monkish, and unmanly in its attitude toward resistance and fighting (“turn the other cheek”), making man too like a sheep, and yet be too violent in its fighting too much (the Crusades)? It was Christianity’s fault that Edward the Confessor did not fight but Richard the Lionheart did.
How could Christianity be rightly accused in its claim of only one truth (vs. one great unconscious church of all humanity rounded on the omnipresence of human conscience) in a world full of very different people and cultures, yet its accusers also be justified in their claim that science and progress was the only light of all people? It seemed their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves.
This puzzled him; the charges seemed too inconsistent, and it began to alarm him. It seemed to Chesterton that Christianity looked not so much as if it was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat it with. What was this thing that bewildered the intellect yet utterly quieted the heart? How did Chesterton reconcile the enormous accumulation of these small but unanimous facts?
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I will not steal Chesterton’s thunder by listing the ultimate answer imaginable; it’s revealed in the pages of Orthodoxy. This work projects a bold, clear defense of the faith with aw-shucks, self-effacing humor (a paradox in itself).
You, reader, will relish this book, and I am excited to know how you’ll wrestle with its implications; you will be better for it. You’ve already set the scene for your interaction with Orthodoxy by chewing on the challenges that a life lived with conviction provides, and arming yourself with a healthy appreciation for Chesterton’s answer to his riddle will equip you to apply diplomacy/political savvy to your world while preserving your moral compass.
You will also appreciate the themes of patriotism, how to avoid the weight of the world resting on your shoulders (~”The madman is not the man who has lost his reason, but rather the man who has lost everything except his reason”), and divine MIRTH that pervade each chapter.
If I could lay out Chesterton’s influence on my own thoughts like this, here it is, simplified:
- I believe there is a God because every detail of life around me—the fact that all blades of grass grow upward, that the sun rises every day—is either a vast cosmic conspiracy of atoms or a designed machine at work, set in place by a Designer. (In the beginning…all creation sings His praises).
- If that Designer has the ability and creativity to make the world and us, He also has the ability to place thoughts in our mind, make us born where we were, give us faith or the choice of skepticism, etc. (He has set eternity on our hearts).
- The evil in the world indicates that we have abused our freedom given by the Designer; so what is the solution?
- We could haggle over what people see as conflicts in Scripture, but the fact is that Christianity presents the only cogent worldview that reconciles the beauty of Creation along with the horrible things that people do to one another…AND it provides the answer to the dilemma of how we are to live in that creation and reach harmony with the Designer.
The more Chesterton considered Christianity, the more he saw its chief aim was not to establish a rule and order (which it had done), but to give room for good things to run wild. There was simply nothing else that cleansed the soul with fire and made it clear like crystal. I agree.
With every esteem and respect,
Calamity Greenleaf
