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Paul
the Apostle noticed that few great intellects were called to the faith, because
God wanted to make the wisdom of the wise seem foolish.(i) When intellectuals
do come to the faith, they often explain to fellow intellectuals why they've
fallen into this religion they used to scorn. The need to apologize has given
the world St. Augustine's Confessions, C. S. Lewis' Surprised By Joy, John
Cardinal Newman's -Apologia, and a real gem of Christian apologetics from the
great Victorian writer G. K. Chesterton, called Orthodoxy.
Chesterton, one of the most influential writers of the Victorian era, wrote
over 100 books himself and contributed to 200 more, wrote scores of essays on
any topic imaginable, wrote poetry, detective stories, history, Christian
apologetics, and did it all in an age before word processors were even a dream.
His well-known works include The Father Brown Omnibus (a collection of
mysteries featuring a priest as hero), The Man Who Was Thursday, Heretics, and
Orthodoxy. His Christian writings influenced the writers of the mid-twentieth
century (C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, etc.) as those writers have, in turn,
influenced ours.
Raised in a Unitarian home, Chesterton traveled from skepticism to
Christianity during his twenties, mostly by analyzing the various
"free-thinking" philosophies he encountered as a lecturer. Noting in them what
he considered serious errors about the nature of the universe, Chesterton
published a criticism of several major writers of his day, including Rudyard
Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells, entitled Heretics. A reviewer
named G. S. Street countered that he would worry about his philosophy only
after "Mr. Chesterton has given us his." Chesterton, with all the solemn
dignity of youth, accepted the challenge and delivered Orthodoxy in 1908, which
chronicled his own journey from skepticism to faith in a stream of ideas and
arguments. He was 34 years old at the time.
Since Chesterton was both a genius and the son of a saner era than our own,
the ideas which coursed through his head may astonish modern readers. He seems
to turn the world on its head; the book is a continuous feast of the
delightfully unexpected. To Chesterton, faith is reason, orthodoxy is liberty,
the order of our universe is as unexpected as the wildest fairy tale, and
heeding tradition is as natural as allowing all citizens to vote. Modern
readers at first will think him just a little bit crazy, but as they warm up to
his approach, they will begin to feel that perhaps his point of view is
healthier than theirs, and in the best of cases, they will begin to right
themselves.
That it is we, and not Chesterton, who are upside down, is proved by prophecy;
the philosophies against which Chesterton argued have run their full course in
the 20th century, and everything Chesterton claimed they would produce has come
to pass. Chesterton predicted modernism would lead to madness, and in the
following 80 years the world went mad. Chesterton predicted that questioning
everything would lead to the abandonment of reason, and Postmodernism has
finally admitted to exactly that. Chesterton claimed that man was at the
crossroads, and man clearly made the wrong turn.
Orthodoxy is subtitled "The Romance of Faith," because Chesterton's thesis
claims that it is romance, mystery, fairy tales, which keep men sane and
connects them with eternal truth. By contrast, the Materialist's insistence on
causation within our universe is like the delusion of a man who thinks he's
God:
-
- if
the man in [an insane asylum in London] is the real God, he is not much of a
god. And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is
not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk. The deity [of the madman] is less
divine than many men; and ... the whole of life is something much more grey,
narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater
than the whole.
At first
blush, insisting on mysteries violates our 20th century intuition, but it turns
out to be the right prescription for the disease; Materialism errs precisely
because it lacks humility, and restoring mystery to the cosmos also restores
our humility before God's creation.
Developing this notion of mystery, Chesterton observes that our universe is a
most improbable and miraculous place, first in the sense that it is odd:
-
- I
could never mix in the common murmur... against monogamy, because no
restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself.
and then
in the sense that it appears to be willful:
-
- It is
possible that God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun; and every
evening, "Do it again" to the moon...It may be that He has the eternal appetite
of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than
we.
His
argument ends with the claim that the mirth of heaven is too great for men to
apprehend.
-
-
...the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken
farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous
levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while
the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
Between
those two points, Chesterton cites his discoveries about the world and the
faith as they occurred to him, in order, during his journey to faith. He read
all the doubters of Christianity and wondered, "This must be an extraordinary
religion to incite so diverse and contradictory a set of claims against it." He
realized the futility of constantly altering goals, and how the notion of
progress itself denoted an ideal fixed before the foundations of the world. He
discovered that Christianity predicted each of the truths he was discovering
about the world and its inhabitants. He noticed that all attempts to make
Christianity more "liberal" or "scientific" or "free" actually made the world
more tyrannical, more limited, and more drab.
Thus Chesterton came to understand the great beauty and romance of orthodoxy,
"the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints."(ii) He saw that
only within the bounds of orthodoxy were men free to innovate, to advance, to
fight tyranny, oppression, or poverty.
The orthodoxy Chesterton defends is an old and ecumenical one, the doctrines
articulated in the Apostles' Creed. He claims to lack the space to address the
question of where lies the seat of apostolic authority. However, there is
herein a challenge to Protestants worth mentioning: Chesterton is Catholic, and
his notion of orthodoxy includes not only the creeds but the Church which
embodies them. He refers once to the Reformation as "the shattering of a
religion." He describes the Roman church as teetering between chasms of error
on either side, but miraculously maintaining a precarious and dangerous
balance. His defense of Romanism is faint, but present.
While Chesterton thus occasionally incites in Protestant readers a twinge of
caution, he more often incites in them respect for traditional thought. There
is nothing here of the "works righteousness" for which so many Protestants
condemn the Roman church; there is only good sense and humility in the face of
an eternal and wise God, and a sense of profound joy in His creation. This same
sense permeates the works of the greatest Catholic writers (and Protestant ones
as well), and one hopes that Chesterton may occasion more Protestants to esteem
their Catholic brothers more highly.
Though Orthodoxy is brief, it is hard going for the modern reader. Chesterton
thought deeply and often poetically, and his argument is woven in a complex and
beautiful fashion which is difficult to follow in one reading. It took this
author three readings to understand the flow of his argument. Still, each of
the arguments in the book is robust enough, and, to our modern and skeptical
world, heretical enough, that even considering them piecemeal is useful. This
book will make the average reader work, but it is worth the effort.
One of the great benefits of reading Chesterton is that one begins to
understand how people thought at the turn of the last century. In Chesterton we
find not only good reason and a sense of wonder, but a level of sanity and
civility foreign to modern culture. Even his philosophical enemies are his
jovial friends. We would do well to drink deeply and often from the well of an
earlier West, from before the Great Poisoning of the 20th century.
Orthodoxy should be required reading for any modern apologist, for those who
defend Christianity in the marketplace of modern ideas. It is also useful for
anyone who wants a more general overview of man's place in the universe. This
book is a thinker's paradise, mostly because it goes beyond mere thought to
deep feeling, to joy and humility, where man and God rejoice together in the
great dance of heaven.
i I Corinthians 1:19-21
ii Jude 3
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