Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is almost certainly Chesterton’s most famous book. The only other serious contenders may be fiction like The Man Who was Thursday or—just maybe, and mostly thanks to TV now—the Father Brown stories. But for many who come to know Chesterton as more than a source of pithy quotations, Orthodoxy serves as their introduction and guide. That is certainly true of me.

Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy as a follow-up to Heretics, which I covered here last week. Heretics offers a strong dose of Chesterton’s emerging worldview, albeit in diffuse form and somewhat less accessible a hundred and twenty years on. Orthodoxy, though a sequel, is better remembered thanks to offering a positively stated vision rather than responding to a string of false doctrines and—I think this is key—because of the form in which Chesterton wrote it.

Because Orthodoxy is highly personal. Those familiar with Chesterton’s discursive, topsy-turvy style and his use of metaphor, simile, and paradox will find that here, but—in a phrase from his later book The Everlasting Man—viewed from “the inside.” Rather than simply opining on a subject in his signature style, Orthodoxy more than any of Chesterton’s other books takes the reader directly into his mind. Though he wrote an Autobiography just before he died, Orthodoxy remains the definitive testament to his growth, conversion, and imagination. All it lacks to make it a memoir is names and dates.

Briefly, Orthodoxy tells the story of Chesterton’s growth away from a comfortable “paganism.” His journey is marked at every step by self-examination, examination of what others have told him, and a turn in another direction. His attitude is a cheerful version of Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” refusing to comply with fashionable ideas or accept fashionable attitudes and rebelling against the complacent. Guided both by intuition and rigorous, complex questioning (“My own case for Christianity is rational;” he writes near the end, “but it is not simple”), he works his way into philosophical positions that he always finds preempted by Christianity: having tried “to found a heresy of my own,” he found, “when I had put the last touches to it, . . . that it was orthodoxy.”

Like all of Chesterton’s non-fiction, Orthodoxy reads smoothly but proves hard to summarize, the curlicues of Chesterton’s thinking always feeling right and leading to the right place but also surprising. Having slaved over this review more than any other Chestertober post, I can’t claim to do the book justice here. I’ll have to content myself with a illuminating a few connected points and suggesting the larger shape of the book.

Having begun as an uncatechized pagan or agnostic, he moves, through the process mentioned above, toward religious faith and finally to Christianity itself. Along the way Chesterton integrates the critiques of progressivism, materialism, scientism, sentimental humanism, racialism, rationalism, pessimism, cynicism, and other persistent -isms from Heretics into a coherent argument and makes his case for Christianity as the answer to all of them, the only complete picture of the world.

The rational part of Chesterton’s approach is strongly historical. Told that Christianity was responsible for the misery of the Dark Ages, Chesterton “read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.” He noticed contradictions, criticisms that Christianity was both unmanly and too warlike, denigrating to women but only of interest to women, forcing people into families and tearing families apart to put people in monasteries, emphasizing poverty and humility too much but also too full of “pomp” and “ritualism,” of being too sexually repressed and too reproductively fruitful, and on and on. Tempted to conclude that Christianity was more monstrous than he had at first assumed, he realized instead that “[i]t looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.” There is a dimension of apologetic work in which reason, fact, and study are appropriate, and this is it.

The other aspect of his approach, on the other hand, is observational, intuitive, and even aesthetic. In reviewing Heretics I noted Chesterton’s artistic background and sensibilities, and the gut feeling that something in the world is out of true, out of proportion, both begins his investigations and guides them. The truth of Christianity is encoded in the real world, perceptible to the senses and internalized both through doctrine and the prevailing Christian culture of his day—the starkest difference between his original audience and ourselves, to which we’ll return—as well as through impressions gained from fairy tales, observation, and inference and analogy. This is where Chesterton most often invokes common sense and tradition, “the democracy of the dead.” These are arguments, too, but not the kind amenable to the spreadsheet.

Taken together, these two “truth-detectors,” as Peter Kreeft has called them, give the honest seeker complementary pictures of the truth. The task is rightly perceiving, followed by synthesis. As Chesterton himself points out, the opportunities for mistakes are infinite. Only Christianity has avoided them all.

As I mentioned, Orthodoxy is an intensely personal and interior book, taking the reader through years of intellectual workings to reach Chesterton’s destination. The memoir-like format, the warm confessional tone—unlike the polemics of Heretics, which are jovial but still polemics—and especially the imaginative appeal of his reasoning unify the many threads of thought before they are brought together in the final chapters. These must also account for much of the book’s success, then and since.

Chesterton’s book is a personal story, so here’s mine, parts of which I have related previously. Like many others, I came to Chesterton by swimming upstream from CS Lewis’s work. I had heard Chesterton was an influence on Lewis, and when I stumbled upon a copy of Orthodoxy in Barnes & Noble one day, I bought it.

Orthodoxy surprised, challenged, and encouraged me. I was intensely interested in apologetics and debate at the time and was used to an icy logical approach. Chesterton’s combination of reasoning with art and instinct was surprising but spoke powerfully to me. Like Lewis, he didn’t just focus on splitting hairs and debating points of fact, but targeted the heart, the imagination, and all of existence. It spoke powerfully to me, and of course it was loaded from front to back with quotable lines. And this was at a time before you could encounter all the Chesterton quotations you could stand online.

As simple as parts of it are, it also suggested the need for frequent rereading—and that I would want to read more from Chesterton. I did. Scarcely a year has gone by over the last twenty when I haven’t read something by him, and this book in particular has grown with me. As a college student I appreciated the reinforcement as well as testing my assumptions about what faith and apologetics were. Rereads over the years have impressed me with his insight into human nature and his fierce arguments for joy and humor against melancholy and despair—a theme I’ve written on recently. During my most recent reading I noticed and appreciated Chesterton’s tireless refusal to accept fashionable consensus. Told about the Dark Ages, “I read a little history.” Told a lot of tall tales about Jesus, Jesus’s character, and what Jesus would do about this or that issue (remember that the man who first asked “What would Jesus do?” was a contemporary of Chesterton, and a socialist), “[i]nstead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament.”

Chesterton is always suspicious of accepted polite opinion, always ready to look into a thing, and always ready to be surprised. His openness and intellectual honesty—agree with him or not—are winsome and have kept him appealing.

To return from the personal to more of a review, however, (“clos[ing],” as Chesterton says in the book’s final paragraph, “this chaotic volume”), I have to wonder about the strengths of Orthodoxy’s arguments in our own age. As people as diverse as David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions, Richard Dawkins in various interviews, and especially Tom Holland in Dominion have pointed out, Christianity has invisibly undergirded our civilization for centuries. Our assumptions have been Christian assumptions. Chesterton could bank on that and argue from it.

But in the more than century since, those assumptions have been shaken—partly by complacency and Christian self-sabotage, partly by deliberate philosophical warfare by the descendants of Chesterton’s heretics, partly by the unintended consequences of the kind of amoral sentimental do-gooders Chesterton sought to expose. Just this year Carl Trueman ably outlined the changed assumptions in anthropology and their consequences. Could Orthodoxy, which assumes much of the worldview Chesterton shared even with his opponents, still make Chesterton’s case?

I think so. The cultural foundation of his Edwardian world has been fatally compromised but, just as with the worldviews attacked in Heretics, many of the problems are the same. Christianity is mocked, derided, and libeled in just the ways Chesterton outlines. Fashionable opinion still hews to notions of steady progress, materialist evolution, and, in ethics, an airy, inconsistent humanitarian impulse apparently rooted in nothing. Further, and more positively, apologists like Alister McGrath have argued that the strict logic-chopping arguments of the previous century will be inadequate for rising generations. An unintended consequence of postmodernism and other such schools of thought has been openness to the intuitive and imaginative as avenues of argument—just Chesterton’s specialty.

That leaves only superficial hurdles to encountering and arguing—but not quarreling—with Chesterton. As much as it pains me to say it, in the words of Matthew Lee Anderson, quoted in the foreword to a recent edition of Orthodoxy, “it is a dated work.” The language and structure may pose problems for readers who, we are constantly reminded now, have been so badly served by the educational system and a culture that militates against reading, attention, and thought. I don’t personally find Chesterton forbidding, but for those who do, Simon Vance’s audiobook recording is an easy entry point thanks to Chesterton’s conversational tone, and Broadman & Holman’s 2022 hardback of Orthodoxy edited by Trevin Wax has had the long paragraphs broken up, topical headers inserted to better illuminate the structure of the book, and unfamiliar names and terms annotated.

I’m not usually a fan of this kind of formatting, but the goal is to ease modern readers into Chesterton’s thought and the words remain unchanged. If that means more people can meet Chesterton through Orthodoxy and be challenged and changed by his work, I can embrace that.

To return to that line from Anderson quoted above, though dated in some ways, Orthodoxy “comes nearer to timelessness than anything we have today.” A Chesterton-worthy paradox. Orthodoxy is still the best place to encounter Chesterton, the purest dose of his personality, and a challenging introduction to discovering the world as it has already been revealed.