Orthodoxy - G. K. Chesteron

Orthodoxy (G. K. Chesterton, 1909)

I read this book twice, and I still don't think I can do justice to its genius. Despite the ominous title, this is not a dry treatise on Christian belief: it is a fun, adventurous, and (dare I say it) spicy intellecutal autobiography of how Chesterton came to believe the Christian faith. As a chronicle of the questions and answers found by an intelligent and thoughtful person, this book is worth a read by even the staunchest of atheists.

First off, it's hilarious: Chesterton has a knack for employing wit in the service of reason. When talking about love: "A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck." When talking about arbitrary rules in fairy tales: "If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth." One more, on materialism: "The materialist is just as sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as [a madman] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts."

The gist of the book is thus: Chesterton, like all good intellectuals of his day, tried his best to get on board with the latest ideas:

Materialism - Matter and energy is all there is, and everything in existence was forced to be the way it is by the laws of nature and physics.

Will to Power/Nietzsche - Man must make choices simply to prove he is not constrained by the common herd of society.

Humanism/Progressivism - Things are gradually getting better and better as we cull the good ideas out of religions past and discard the rest.

Socialism - If goods, powers, and wealth are evenly distrubuted, immorality and suffering will disappear.

Hedonism/Paganism - Enjoy life to the fullest, and forget about those old restrictive rules.

Spirituality - All religions are the same, and all things living and unliving are pieces of a greater cosmic whole.

As he thinks through these ideas, he runs into the problems of his own experience. In Chesterton's view, life is a wonder, a beautiful work of art, yet at the same time a dangerous place where the good things are like remnants of a wreck. He doesn't quite get mystical, but he definitely paints a poetic and sometimes paradoxical picture of the human experience and the world we live in. People need transcendent joy and desperate sorrow; the familiarity of home and the foreign thrill of adventure; a sense of devotion to a place but also the desire to tear the place down and build it up better than ever. Where he sees compromise in other ideas, in Christianity he sees both passions living side by side at full force. Where he sees the paralyzation of thought or action in other ideas, in Christianity he sees a path for both.

Anyway, he is infinitely better at expressing his ideas than I am. There are occasional references to people and places that don't make much sense a century later, but in context, it's easy to catch on. For the intellectually curious, this is a great read.

Arbitrary rating: 5 out of 5 winged horses