ORTHODOXY

By by G.K. Chesterton (1874~1936)

Published by Harold Shaw Publishers

A Quick Focus

The Book’s Purpose

Articulate a response to the prevailing secular mindset Elucidate a positive and romantic defense of the Christian faith Relate the author’s personal journey of faith Communicate the sufficiency of orthodox Christianity as the best response to modern man’s intellectual concerns

The Book’s Message

Modern philosophy insists on a materialistic universe devoid of the supernatural. But man cannot live by this bread alone. We crave the security and adventure of a divinely-ordered world, and our souls are homeless on the streets of the new secular city. This, then, becomes our argument for the truth of Christianity. The orthodox Christian faith, as encapsulated in the Apostle’s Creed, gives us what modern philosophy cannot~real meaning, real joy, and real humanity. Substituting Christianity for a secularized world view, we can recover a sane imagination, an authoritative framework for reason, a proper patriotism for the world, and a commitment to progress. And when we do, we will delight to discover once again what Christianity discovered so long ago.

THE MARINER AND THE MADMAN

There was once a mariner who set sail in search of uncharted lands, but due to a miscalculation, he ended up landing on his own shores. Ignorant of his error, he proudly planted the flag, claiming his very own homeland on behalf of the same. Ironically, he was quite pleased when he discovered his mistake, for he had experienced all the thrill of discovery without sacrificing the familiarity.

This is what we seek: a life which is both secure and poetically picturesque~one part fairy tale and one part fireside. Only Christianity can fulfill these two spiritual needs of man. If we are fortunate, we will be like the silly sailor who rejoiced in his discovery of the familiar. Searching for a truth to call our own, we will finally plant our flag in the welltrodden soil of the Christian faith.

“…I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it…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.”

For ages the central undeniable fact of human existence was the reality of sin. Now, however, modern thinkers have proposed alternative explanations for the human condition. Many no longer believe that man is bad. Yet we can agree that he may be crazy.

So let us begin with the insane asylum. Some believe that people end up there because of the debilitating effects of imagination. But poets and mystics do not go crazy; the great thinkers frequently go mad~ because they cannot reconcile the world to their ways of explaining it. Many lunatics, however, are excellent reasoners. They order their entire world in a hyper-logical though unenlightened manner, a perfect but contracted circle.

Oddly enough, the same heightened logic and diminished spirituality which we observe in the halls of the asylum is often present in the halls of learning. Modern thinkers live in a deterministic universe in which everything is logically connected. But it is a puny cosmos. Life (which is concerned with conflict, pride, love, and adventure) remains a riddle to them, because it cannot be reduced to a mechanistic process. “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

This sort of unhealthy thinking is extraordinarily limiting as well. A Christian may believe in an ordered world of causation, but the smallest crumb of miracle will crumble the materialist’s philosophy. By denying the reality of the will, fatalism destroys our freedom to curse, thank, justify, or resist temptation. Materialists can change the environment which governs their responses, but they cannot change themselves.

The alter ego of materialism, the belief that the world is merely a projection of the individual imagination, suffers from the same defect. This position is eminently logical but false. You cannot prove that we are not dreaming, but the person who cannot believe his own senses is, nevertheless, crazy. And this is the principle mark of insanity, not that it is illogical, but that its reason is not rooted in reality.

If this is true, mysticism is the only remedy which will allow us to protect our sanity. Mystery leads to a healthy life. The ordinary man has always been mystical, free to doubt his gods but free to believe in them as well. He is more interested in truth than in consistency. He accepts both fate and free will, embracing the contradiction. And he lives happily ever after.

” The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid… The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything~Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility…”

THE SUICIDE OF THOUGHT

Some champion truth but have no mercy. Others dispense mercy~at the expense of truth. But perhaps the greatest damage done by disconnected virtues is the skewing of our sense of humility. Modesty is no longer related to ambition, but to conviction. We were intended to doubt ourselves but not the truth, but humility now seems to imply that one cannot believe he possesses the truth. “The modern world is full of the old Christian values gone mad.”

Our day is marked by misplaced goodness, righteous sentiments which are all out of proportion. The danger we now face is the selfdestruction of intellect. If there is no validity in human thought, then there is nothing to be gained by thinking. Reason requires us to believe that our thinking is truly related to reality, a conviction which the modern skeptic has lost. And this loss of faith reduces all thinking to a pointless exercise.

The role of religious authority was to defend reason, to keep mankind from spiraling into this nothingness of skepticism. The reason for the creeds and the crusades was to protect reason, not to obliterate it. Religion and reason are intimately connected because both are founded on a faith which cannot be proven. When the former was rejected, a dynamic was set in motion which would destroy the latter as well.

Current philosophy, then, is more than insane; it is suicidally insane. Even as it heralds the coming of free thought, it writes its epitaph. We cannot move on to a greater skepticism than that which questions our own existence and the reality of reality. This is not a beginning. It is an end, a dead end.

IMAGINATION AND REMNANTS OF THE WRECK

We all mastered the fundamentals of philosophy in grade school, for that is when we learned to believe in fairy tales. Far from fantasy, fairy tales are entirely reasonable tidbits of common sense. Cinderella shows how the humble are exalted. Sleeping Beauty pictures mankind, bestowed with all natural blessing, then cursed with death, but ultimately finding that death reduced to a sleep from which one may awake.

This elfin world bestows upon us a vision of reality which is subsequently confirmed by the facts. For the world of fairies is one of necessary logic, of things which must be. Rationalists, however, no longer believe in fairy tales, and their unbelief is their undoing. They speak as if the particular events of life were rationally necessary. But the fact that trees bear fruit is not necessary. The fact that two trees plus one tree equals three trees is necessary.

Fairy tales are governed by the real laws of mental relations, whereas physical science is governed by the non-law of weird repetitions. Miracles involve no mental impossibility. We can believe that the beanstalk grew up to stratospheric heights, but we know that only one quantity of beans equals five.

The rationalistic world of science treats natural “laws” as if there is some reason why things should have to be that way. They pretend to know why one thing leads to another, when in reality they merely observe that it does so.

Fairy tales, on the other hand, preserve the wonder of the world through magic. The witch says, ” Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle will fall.” She does not know why, but she has seen many castles go down in this way. Hers is not a mysterious view of life. It is cold, rational agnosticism. The scientist is the one who purports to know the magic formula for reality.

“Compared to them [fairy tales] religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong.”

Fairy tales also teach us all about conditional joy. There is always something wonderful to be had if we can only learn to say no to its alternative. One could live in a jeweled palace if only he did not say the word “rabbit.” Cinderella had to be back by midnight. Man could live forever if only he did not eat the fruit of the garden.

Both in elfland and on earth, bliss is probationary. Happiness depends on not doing that which we could do but should not, even if we don’t understand the prohibition. If Cinderella wants to know why she must be back at 12:00, her fairy godmother might quite rightly question why she should be allowed to go the ball at all. And the same question might be put to us as well. If the world is a wonderfully surprising place, which didn’t have to be this way but nevertheless is, then submitting to certain mysterious conditions is quite a meager price to pay for the privilege of being part of it.

The modern world is opposed to the ethics of elfland. A mechanistic world view says that everything is just as it had to be. Leaves are green because they could be no other color. Yet the fairy-tale philosopher delights in the green of the leaf, because for him it might have been red. “I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story there is a story-teller.”

Modern thought cannot tolerate a surprisingly wonderful world, nor assent to the notion of conditional joy. It diminishes man by pointing out that he is just a speck in the monstrosity that is the universe. But the materialist, like the madman, is walled in by the prison of his reductionist principles. He thinks nothing of it, claiming that his jail, this materialistic universe, is so very big. Yes, it is grandly large, but it is pitifully dim, lacking the decorative touch of anything interesting such as forgiveness or free will. And it is still a jail, even if the corridors are long.

But why think of the universe as large in the first place? If it is the only thing that is, we could just as easily consider it cozy as vast. And if we see it as small, then all of its elements immediately become the more precious.

Remember Robinson Crusoe? Marooned on a small island, his existence was limited to those few priceless items preserved from the wreck. Even his kitchen utensils became ideal because they might have been lost but were saved for his use.

Consider how wonderful the universe would be if we saw it as the remnant of a cosmic wreck. The fact that we have trees and sun and mountains, when we might not, would transform the world into a precious commodity. Life would be more like magic than like necessity, a work of art created by someone. We would show our gratitude by a humble and proper use of it. We would owe our obedience to whatever created such a world. And we would see our good as a sacred remnant, saved from the wreck. OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE COSMIC PATRIOT

To worry about being an optimist or a pessimist is to miss the point. We do not evaluate the world in a dispassionate fashion, as if sent by some alien race to decide whether or not this would be a good place to settle. Whether we see it as mostly wonderful or mostly grim, we belong to the world long before we are capable of forming an opinion as to its merit. Therefore, we must accept the universe as it is in a more patriotic and less analytical manner.

For the patriot all roads lead to love. We love our land for all that is good about it, and we love it all the more for its deficiencies, for loyalty precedes judgment. We might call this kind of proper optimism about the world cosmic patriotism.

The pessimist, however, is surely the cosmic anti-patriot. Though he may play the role of the candid friend, the pessimist does not tell the truth. He announces doom and gloom as if he were sorry for it, but in reality he finds a perverse pleasure in our failure. He is not to be trusted, for he does not love the object of his criticism.

That is not to say that all optimists are pure of heart. They are all loyalists, but their loyalty may be either natural (rational) or supernatural (irrational). Ironically, those who love without a reason will improve their world, while those who must justify their affection constitute a destructive force. The mystic patriot will make things better at any cost, for he loves the world quite apart from it merits. But a mere rational loyalty, if it judges the world unworthy, will allow it to rot.

” …The fanatic can be a skeptic. Love is not blind… Love is bound, and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”

We say that allegiance must precede reform. Others maintain that it would be more reasonable to see the world for what it is, a mixed bag of good and evil. That attitude, so pervasive in our time, is disastrous. For in that case our happiness and anger cancel out one another, producing a discontented contentment. Rather, we need an extra dose of both delight and disgust that only an irrational optimism, a cosmic patriotism, can provide.

Christianity supplies the answer to the unhappy pessimist and the even more dissatisfied optimist. The transcendence of God, his separation from his very creation, is the heart of the Christian message. When God put the universe in motion, the poet was separated from his poem.

The world is the purposeful and cozy place which God created for us. Therefore, we should feel at home here. However, we must love the world without being worldly, for the rebellion of creation means that the world is not as it should be. Optimism is turned upsidedown. We are not optimistic because all is right. We are optimistic because, compared to the supernatural, all is askew, and therefore it is right to feel homesick at home.

THE PARADOX OF CHRISTIANITY

“ …Whenever we feel that there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.”

The world is a tricky place, for it is almost logical. Its regularities are manifest even to the simple, but its irregularities surprise even the sage. Imagine that some creature unfamiliar with our human race began to observe our anatomy. It would find us strikingly symmetrical, one side of our bodies being the mirror image of the other~two arms, two legs, two eyes, two nostrils. If mathematically minded, this creature might surmise that we had two shoulder blades or even twin lobes of the brain. But if it concluded that we have a single heart placed just off center, we would deem the stranger something more than a mathematician.

Christianity goes beyond logic for precisely this reason; it is able to predict the unpredictable but true. Demonstrating the merits of Christianity, however, is not easy. It would be much easier to defend a theory which is proven by this or that than to defend a philosophy which is proven by everything.

To be sure, Christianity’s rationalistic detractors attack it from all sides. It is at once too optimistic and too pessimistic. One claims that it is a nightmare, another a utopian fantasy. Some see it as the mother of all wars, while others belittle its impractical pacifism. Is this faith so vile as to sport so many contradictory vices, or might there be something wrong with the rationalism of the critics?

Given the contradictory criticisms to which the Christian faith has been subjected, one must conclude that it is either quite grotesque or quite perfect. For even the ideal man would undoubtedly be criticized by those who were not. The short would think him too tall, and the tall too short. The stocky would insist that he was too thin, while the thin considered him overweight.

In the case of Christianity we find that this explanation fits the problem just as a key fits a lock. Those who criticize Christianity for being restrictive turn out to be too unhealthily hedonistic. Those who criticize Christianity’s faith turn out to be unhealthily pessimistic.

But is orthodoxy really the perfect point of equilibrium in these matters? Aristotle found virtue in a balance. But Christianity suggests a more surprising and even paradoxical answer, based on a collision of two apparently conflicting passions. Christian courage juxtaposes a passion for life with a willingness to die. Christian modesty pits the exaltation of man in the created order against his brokenness. Christian charity means pardoning the unpardonable and loving the unlovable. By contrast, pagan attempts to achieve balance do so by diluting the opposing elements, leaving us with only a deflated shell of passionless passions.

Orthodoxy, then, is a thrilling romance, not the ponderous yawn-spawner which many people imagine. It is dynamic and often paradoxical, but that is precisely how it maintains its truth and its vitality. The easier path is that of the critical modernists who fashion Christianity in their own image. Had the Church fallen into this same trap, it would thereby have been tamed. Instead, it continues to ramble wildly through history, proving itself uniquely capable of predicting the unpredictable.

THE ETERNAL REVOLUTION

Everyone is interested in making things better. But what does “better” mean? Nature cannot answer this question, for nature accepts things as they are without making value judgments. Nor does the mere passage of time guarantee progress. Any meaningful sense of progress must come from a definite vision of how things should be, a point toward which we can move.

Mankind today cannot be truly progressive. It cannot reform the world to fit the vision, for it is too busy changing the vision. We have found it easier to alter the ideal than to attain it. If we decide that the world should be blue, then we can set about changing everything to that color. But if this year we say blue and the next year red and later yellow, then we will end up with much vacillation and little progress, because we don’t know where we are headed.

” …Ours is only an age of conservatism because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of the matter will be left to itself.”

When ideals evolve, there can be no progressive revolution. That happens only when people are convinced that what they perceive as an inequity will be as wrong tomorrow as it is today. There is no point in risking one’s well-being to achieve a goal which may turn out not be a goal at all. Progress requires a fixed vision of the ideal.

Not only must our ideal of progress be fixed, it must also be complex. It must involve an entire series of elements in their exact proportion. For this reason the vision of an inevitable natural progress will not do, for without a mind behind the vision we will have impersonal change toward no particular goal.

Not every sort of change leads to a better world, even if directed toward a given end. Human happiness is predicated on a principle of proportionality. For instance, we must be humble enough to be in awe of the world and yet haughty enough to defy it when necessary. A measure of faith in ourselves is necessary for an adventure, yet we must at the same time doubt ourselves in order to enjoy it.

Christianity answers these three challenges of progress.

1. It fixed the ideal before the foundation of the world. 2. It can give us the complex picture of life toward which we should move. 3. And its doctrine of original sin alerts us to the need to work toward that ideal.

A belief in the inevitability of progress is the best reason not to be progressive. For in that case we need do nothing at all. The best reason for being progressive is that things tend to get worse. Conservatism doesn’t work, because when you leave something as it is, it is, nonetheless, subjected to change and will deteriorate. If this is true of inanimate objects, it is all the more true of human institutions. We must always guard against corruption and the abuse of power. An eternal revolution is called for to counteract the insidious effects of man’s fallenness.

THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY

There are words which sound like they ought to mean something very different than what they actually denote. Take for instance, the term liberal as applied to those theologians who believe in the material origin of that which exists, the impossibility of the miraculous, the improbability of personal immortality, etc. We shall demonstrate how the freedom which such ideas pretend to introduce into the Church end up promoting tyranny in the world, making it the least liberal ideology imaginable.

Take the example of miracles. The liberal churchman rejects miracles, not due to his liberal Christianity but to his rigid materialism. In fact, liberalism (as classically understood~relating to freedom), if it comes down on either side of the miracles question, would prejudice us in favor of them. Miracles represent freedom in the universe, the freedom of God to act.

Liberals are also fond of pantheism. How often do we hear phrases like, “All religions teach essentially the same thing, although they may differ in their rites and forms?” But the fact of the matter is just the opposite. There is significant similarity in their systems of priests, scriptures, altars, and feasts. But their messages are clearly different. All humanity believes that we are caught in sin’s trap, but there is disagreement about how to get out of it.

Some have suggested that all faiths are just manifest versions or perversions of the one true religion, the foundation of which is the universal self. But if we are all just one person, then we cannot love our neighbor but only ourselves. Love demands personality and particularity. Christianity is the only philosophy which depicts God as glad that the universe is something outside Himself, for only in this way can we love Him.

It is this distinction between subject and object which makes moral action possible. The pantheist has no motivation and, indeed, no possibility of changing reality. But the Christian keeps before him an ideal into which reality may be conformed. It is for that reason that in the West tyrants have been dethroned, while in the East there is no particular rationale for doing so.

Modernists may insist on the inevitable salvation of all men, but it is the possibility of perdition which motivates man to moral action. For the Eastern fatalist, everything works out mathematically according to the structures of fate. But for the Christian, free will plays out like a story with any number of possible outcomes. The fact that things can go wrong is the reason we must make them go right.

The modernist also attempts to dismiss the divinity of Christ. Quite apart from the truth of the matter, consider what a revolutionary thing it is for God to become an outcast for a righteous cause. A God who rebelled lends credence to the notion of rebellion.

“Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.”

Far from destroying orthodoxy, those who rail against it merely succeed in destroying society. Trying to eliminate Adam’s responsibility before God, they prove that man is not responsible to man. Denying God the right to punish, they deny it to man as well. Rejecting man’s eternal personality, they do not make heaven less joyous but earth less interesting. By attacking God they have destroyed humanity instead. AUTHORITY AND THE ADVENTURER

We have shown how orthodoxy supports those principles fundamental to the promotion of a just and happy society. But now the critical question: Why not just accept the principles and refuse the orthodoxy? Perhaps the simplest reason is that we are drawn to rational thought. If we are to treat man as fallen, it seems logically convenient to believe in the Fall. If we are to treat him as a free moral creature, it stands to reason that he does, in fact, have free will.

Rationalists cannot consent to these truths, however. Note three of their principle objections.

* Humans beings are merely a form of animal life. * Religion finds its basis in ignorance and fear. * Priests have held back the happiness and well-being of society.

All of these arguments are logical and legitimate. The only valid objection which we can offer is that they are false.

Both men and monkeys have hands, but that physical coincidence is not nearly as striking as the fact that men perform marvels with theirs, whereas monkeys do nothing noteworthy.

The assertion that religion was born in a dark and terrible corner of human existence has no basis in fact. What we know of human history points to the introduction of elements such as human sacrifice, not their carry-over from antiquity. Legends of a Fall abound, but legends of progress are unknown.

And what of the priests? Look at Europe and see which countries have open-air singing and dancing, art and color. Catholicism erects barriers, but they are the barriers which surround the playground. Within them we may enjoy the pleasures of paganism. Remove them and fun becomes a threat.

“All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all the creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive.”

There is yet another matter of central importance to the reasonableness of orthodoxy. That is whether or not the supernatural does, in fact, exist. Materialism sees order in the universe and concludes that it must, therefore, be impersonal. It is very difficult to discuss why we believe exactly the opposite to be true, for it is a foundational conviction like the certainty of self.

Wherever the inclination to accept the miraculous may come from, the belief that miracles have, in fact, occurred is not based on speculation but rather on solid evidence. Those who reject miracles maintain that they do so based on facts, whereas the Christian accepts them for dogmatic reasons. Quite the opposite is true, however. There is overwhelming evidence for all kinds of supernatural occurrences.

If a peasant claims that he saw a ghost, the materialist will not believe him. Why? Either out of a decidedly anti-democratic disdain for the common man or because his dogma does not permit it. Christians, on the other hand, are free to examine the evidence. After doing so, we conclude that many miracles have, in fact, happened.

There is no way to organize a controlled scientific experiment for supernatural phenomena; but the facts have somehow conspired with common sense to make believers out of us. It is not just mystics who encounter elves and angels, not just spiritualists who experience the paranormal. Normal and level-headed folks sometimes cross paths with the miraculous.

As a response to materialism, it is important to maintain the reality of the supernatural. But the Christian may find an even higher and more personal reason for faith~that the Church instructs our souls as a living teacher. Plato expressed some wisdom, but no more. Shakespeare excited us with literary images, but he is gone. Through our contact with a living Church, however, we learned yesterday and will learn again tomorrow. It guides us much like our mothers did when we were young. The fundamental reason for accepting religion is not that it tells the truth with regard to specifics, but that it, like a parent, shows itself to be a truth teller.

Competing voices try to entice us with the idea of reincarnation, but consider its consequences. It legitimizes class distinctions based on the merits of past lives. Christianity, on the other hand, presents us with the unattractive idea of original sin, but if we accept it we are then able to pity the poor and distrust the powerful.

Christianity offers us a rigid exterior which protects an inner core of joy and abandonment, whereas modern philosophy offers us all of the beauty of emancipation on the outside, but the inner void is deep and dark. Materialism finds no meaning or romance in the universe, for without limits there can be no danger. Adventure exists only in the land of authority, but never in the land of intellectual anarchy.

This brings us to a final but important thought. The great paradox of our faith is that we are not ourselves. Due to the Fall, our normal condition is not normal at all. We can appreciate this truth, however, only when we begin to recover our true selves. Orthodoxy leads us to that recovery, and that recovery leads us to joy.

Most men find happiness in little things but despair in the big ones. This situation, however, is all upsidedown. Joy should be the norm and melancholy the exception. When we embrace orthodoxy and find meaning in the universe, we also find joy. And once that joy is ours, we know that we are finally right-side-up.

Visit the Christian Classics Ethereal Library website sponsored by Calvin College to browse or download a free copy of Orthodoxy: http://www.ccel.org.

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