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    Orthodoxy
    Orthodoxy
    Orthodoxy
    Ebook217 pages3 hours

    Orthodoxy

    By G. K. Chesterton

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    In this classic of Christian apologetics, Chesterton lays out a sort of “spiritual autobiography”—how he personally came to believe. Chesterton considered it a companion book to his earlier work Heretics. Where Heretics was a collection of essays defending the Christian faith, Orthodoxy is Chesterton’s own story of how he came to believe that faith.

    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was one of C. S. Lewis’ primary mentors in apologetics, and an influence even in his conversion. Novelist, poet, essayist, and journalist, Chesterton was perhaps best known for his Father Brown detective stories. He produced more than 100 volumes in his lifetime, including biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. His Everlasting Man, which set out a Christian outline of history, was one of the factors that wore down Lewis’ resistance to Christianity. Chesterton was one of the first defenders of orthodoxy to use humor as a weapon. Perhaps more important was his use of reason to defend faith.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTyndale House Publishers
    Release dateApr 9, 2012
    ISBN9781598569728
    Author

    G. K. Chesterton

    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific English journalist and author best known for his mystery series featuring the priest-detective Father Brown and for the metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. Baptized into the Church of England, Chesterton underwent a crisis of faith as a young man and became fascinated with the occult. He eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and published some of Christianity’s most influential apologetics, including Heretics and Orthodoxy. 

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    • 5/5
      What a wonderful exploration of one man's faith. Well thought-out, and yet passionate and personal, Orthodoxy shows how Chesterton explored the issues of faith, came to a mighty conclusion, only then to realize that his conclusion was what Christianity had been preaching for centuries.The book is a heavy one, despite its short length, but should be studied carefully by anyone who might be looking seriously at the issue of religion.
    • 5/5
      brilliant!
    • 5/5
      Brilliant. One to read again and again.
    • 5/5
      Chesterton at his philosophical best. He presents his personal arguments for the existence of God and skewers all the puffed up, empty-headed modern philosophers and worthless aristocrats and oligarchs. His wit is as fresh and sharp as Mark Twain's.
    • 5/5
      This book is simply amazing. I've already written a lengthy review of it, and i'll post that here soon.
    • 5/5
      A great work by a great writer. I wish I could have his faith!
    • 4/5
      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.

    Book preview

    Orthodoxy - G. K. Chesterton

    Orthodoxy (eBook edition)

    © 2006, 2012 Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC

    P. O. Box 3473

    Peabody, Massachusetts 01961-3473

    eBook ISBN 978-1-59856-972-8

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    Due to technical issues, this eBook may not contain all of the images or diagrams in the original print edition of the work. In addition, adapting the print edition to the eBook format may require some other layout and feature changes to be made.

    First eBook edition — April 2012

    CONTENTS

    Copyright

    Preface

    Original Preface

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

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    PREFACE

    HENDRICKSON CHRISTIAN CLASSICS EDITION

    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)

    People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.

    —G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

    He stood six foot, three inches tall and weighed in at around three hundred pounds. He had a signature look that featured a distinctive moustache, a pair of glasses perched on his nose, all topped off with a cape, a jaunty hat, a walking stick, and as likely as not, a long cigar. His name was Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and he was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable Christian voices. He’s a man whose name everyone seems to know, but nobody really knows why. And most likely, they know of him because of something he wrote.

    Whatever else may be said about G. K. Chesterton, he was first and foremost a writer. According to one estimate, he wrote one hundred books and contributed to hundreds more; he penned five novels, five plays, hundreds of poems, and two hundred short stories, including the popular tales of the priest-who-would-be-detective Father Brown. He enjoyed considerable success from his books, but at heart he was a journalist. His output included thirteen years of weekly columns for the Daily News, plus thirty years of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News. On top of this, he edited his own newspaper: G. K.’s Weekly. If you’re counting, that’s over four thousand newspaper essays.

    Whatever he wrote about—whether politics, philosophy, history, or theology—his style was distinctive, always full of wit, humility, paradox, and wonder. Chesterton had full command of the medium, the utter respect of his audience—and most importantly, he controlled the conversation. His prominence and influence could perhaps be compared to that of a daily news anchor today—yet Chesterton wrote all his own material!

    Perhaps the most memorable aspect of his writing is his humor. Chesterton found enjoyment in life, and it shows in his writing. He loved telling stories on himself, and others enjoyed telling stories on him.

    One famous story has him wiring his wife, saying,Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be? Home she wired back. Whether they agreed with his beliefs or not, all who knew him found he was fun-loving, engaging, fearless, confident without being judgmental, and most of all, a friend.

    Chesterton was born 1874, in the Kensington section of London, into a family who had, for several generations, operated a successful real estate business. Though his family saw that he was baptized into the Church of England, their beliefs tended more towards Unitarian than traditional Christianity. Like other middle-class families of the time, their values were distinctly post-Christian. Anything perceived as traditional or classical was set aside in favor of progress—that is, whatever was new and modern. Traditional beliefs and institutions—religious, social, artistic, scientific, philosophical—were rejected in favor of personal experience, perceptions, thought, and belief. Good was no longer measured through external absolutes, but rather in what was new and modern and progressive. Whatever was new was also deemed good and beautiful.

    Chesterton’s childhood, though largely non-religious, was nonetheless a childhood that he remembered as filled with fun, a quality he enjoyed his entire life. He was educated at St. Paul’s, but rather than attend university, he enrolled in the Slade School of Art in 1892. It was here that he had his crisis of faith, or more accurately, his crisis of non-faith, which he later called my period of madness. Oddly enough, this depression was triggered by the then-current school of painting, Impressionism, which has long been considered a significant aspect of Modernism. Chesterton explains in his Autobiography:

    I think there was a spiritual significance in Impressionism in connection with this age as the age of skepticism. I mean that it illustrated skepticism in the sense of subjectivism….Whatever may be the merits of this as a method of art, there is obviously something highly subjective and skeptical about it as a method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all.

    As a remedy to the rampant skepticism with which he struggled, he began to read authors like Robert Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Walt Whitman, who affirmed existence and its basic goodness. He also began to nurture gratitude for life and a sense of wonder for the creation itself. To a culture immersed in skepticism, these ideas represented an almost radical approach to living, and for Chesterton, they became his healing.

    In 1895 Chesterton left the Slade School, but a career in art was not for him. He went directly to Fleet Street to work as a journalist, where he honed his craft by writing weekly columns for the Daily News, developing his ideas and building an audience. Columnists were given considerable freedom in their choices of subjects, and Chesterton became one of the Daily News’ star writers, a feat all the more remarkable because he challenged the modernism his readers held close, while endorsing traditional beliefs they held suspect.

    Chesterton’s journey toward faith took another major turn in 1896, when he met Frances Blogg, who would become his wife. Frances was a devout Anglican, and by the time of their marriage in 1901, Chesterton had journeyed away from his few remaining Unitarian beliefs towards Anglicanism. Though moving into Christianity, he was acutely aware of the weaknesses in the Anglican communion, specifically its unwillingness to stand against modernism. His observations were set out in his book Heretics, published in 1905. By his own admission, this book pointed out the problems without providing solutions. By 1908, Chesterton’s faith was more fully formed, and he was ready to offer solutions based on his own experiences. In Orthodoxy, he demonstrates how Christian belief holds the answers to modernity and the problems of modern life.

    Ultimately, Chesterton’s journey led him through the Anglo-Catholic tradition and on to Rome. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1922, after many years of struggle, both within himself and also with his family, especially his wife Frances. For Chesterton, the move was a natural culmination of a life spent upholding Christian belief in the face of corrosive modern thought and culture. Indeed, for him, the Catholic Church was orthodoxy, and other churches, especially the Church of England, were not.

    A few years later, Frances joined the Roman Church as well, much to Chesterton’s joy. The two never had children, but they were a team who enjoyed and esteemed one another. Above all, Frances kept his life in order, and served as his spiritual barometer and guide, as well as his chief literary critic. He and Frances were enthusiastic travelers, visiting Jerusalem (Palestine), the Continent, and North America. Their marriage lasted thirty-five years, until his death in 1936.

    In contrast to many writers who are content to let their published words be the end of the story, Chesterton found life exciting. He was not afraid to confront, whether in print or in person. He debated the noted intellectuals of the day—men like George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Clarence Darrow. He was one of the founding members and first president of London’s Detection Club, a group that included mystery greats like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Ronald Knox.

    Chesterton’s voice is still powerful, still fresh, and still relevant. Two world wars, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, and countless other conflicts, genocides, epidemics, and social upheavals should have, by now, laid to rest the humanistic theology that Chesterton confronted his entire career, but like kudzu,[1] it seems never to go away. What Chesterton deplored in the Church of England—specifically its willingness to bend doctrine in the name of unity—is evident still today. And though modernity may have been superseded by the postmodern, every aspect of culture and life today is drenched in the residual legacy of skepticism, materialism, relativism and socialism—including the Church itself. And as he did for his own generation, Chesterton points us today back to orthodoxy, and that alone makes his voice significant.

    As you read this book, you join a remarkable league of spiritual descendants who count Chesterton among their spiritual mentors: folks like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. S. Eliot, Ronald Knox, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Mahatma Gandhi. In an interview, writer and author Philip Yancey observed, "I would say Orthodoxy had as much influence on my spiritual direction as any single book, and it’s one of the few books that I go back and reread. It was a revolutionary book for me." May it revolutionize your life as well.

    NOTES

    [1] Kudzu: fast-growing vine from eastern Asia . . . grown for fodder and forage and root starch; widespread in the southern United States (WordNet 2.0, 2003, Princeton University).

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    ORIGINAL PREFACE

    This book is meant to be a companion to Heretics [1905], and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called Heretics because it merely criticized current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative, and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. The writer has been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset Newman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere. While everything else may be different, the motive in both cases is the same. It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer’s own solitary and sincere speculations, and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if it is not that, it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.

    —Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1908

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    CHAPTER 1

    Introduction in Defense of Everything Else

    The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel. When, some time ago, I published a series of hasty but sincere papers, under the name of Heretics, several critics for whose intellect I have a warm respect (I may mention specially Mr. G. S. Street[1]) said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm his cosmic theory, but that I had carefully avoided supporting my precepts with example. I will begin to worry about my philosophy, said Mr. Street, when Mr. Chesterton has given us his. It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation. But after all, though Mr. Street has inspired and created this book, he need not read it. If he does read it, he will find that in its pages, I have attempted, in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

    I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England, under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration.

    There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have, in the same few minutes, all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa, without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales, and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales? This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is, in a manner, the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town, and the comfort and honor of being our own town?

    To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument; and this is the path that I here propose to follow. I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need: the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance. For the very word romance has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome. Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. Beyond stating what he proposes to prove, he should always state what he does not propose to prove. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man, at any rate, always seems to have desired. If a man says that extinction is better than existence, or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing, I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.

    But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England. For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England. I do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull. Dullness will, however, free me from the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant. Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defense of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage. I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist, and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.

    For if this book is a joke, it is a joke against me. I am the man who, with the utmost daring, discovered what had been discovered before. If there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton, and then found I was the last. It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious. No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne. I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them, I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood

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