Introduction
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) wrote three classics that rank among the best books of the twentieth century. This is one of them. The Father Brown detective stories and The Everlasting Man are the others.
I am also partial to his Saint Francis, which is still one of the best ways to meet the little poor man from Umbria. Its author, a Londoner at an unkempt six feet four inches tall and easily three hundred pounds, was not at all poor or little or Italian, so it baffles me how he came to know Francesco d’Assisi so well.
Gilbert Keith was born a Chesterton in Kensington, London in 1874, and lived his whole life in the great city. To imagine him in the country or at the seashore is to picture a duck on horseback. The city was his environs even though he was known to become lost in the middle of the street if a writing project or intellectual puzzle were on his mind, with taxis bearing down upon him, honking their horns. His cape, hat, armfuls of books, and big head of curly hair were unbothered as a result.
Ideas were his traction, his way of being in the world. He loved to turn them round and round, spin them, pose them, and debate them. He spoke in parables and paradoxes. His public debates with the great playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was in many ways his exact opposite (trim, severe, pessimistic), were like prizefights. Clarence Darrow, H. G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell, too, sat on stage with him debating ideas before crowds.
He lived among paper. Newspapers, books, plays, drawings, reviews, debate sheets, radio scripts. It’s a good thing he married young, and she outlived him, because it was his wife Frances who maintained order in all his chaos.
He was baptized as an infant into the Church of England and wandered into agnosticism and the occult as a young man. It was Frances who brought him back to the church, where he then remained, satisfied and defensive, against the throes of early twentieth century agnostics, atheists, and anarchists. He sought divine order in the universe, perhaps as a buttress against the disorder in his own life and in the world around him. Remember: the First World War changed England forever, dashing certainties. Chesterton entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1922.
At his requiem mass in 1936, at Westminster Cathedral in London, the Rev. Ronald Knox, another famous convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, said, “All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton’s influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.”
Some of his writing is outdated, but you’ll find many a defender arguing otherwise. There are G. K. Chesterton clubs, societies, and reviews all over the world. It is common for Chesterton fans to hold on tightly to everything from his pen. However, despite the claims of his most authoritative biographer, Ian Ker, the book on Charles Dickens that was, in its day, the most profound analysis of the great novelist, is now ignored by scholars. And you’ll have to excuse the use of masculine pronouns throughout his work. They were acceptable, then. Try to hear “All men” as “All people.” Similarly, he sometimes speaks of eastern cultures and religions in a way that may have been current in early twentieth century England and North America, but that today we call Orientialism, or patronizing. Try to forgive him for that too.
His best writing engages all minds, whether conservative or progressive or somewhere in between. In fact, he is one who despised those labels, once saying, “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” He wasn’t wrong.
Chesterton argues with a lot of people, schools of thought, and ideas in Orthodoxy, and many of those arguments—for example, his frequent appeals to “common sense” (or “uncommon sense”)—can feel passe. But there is wisdom both in and between the lines. Keep in mind, when the blustering gets most intense, that Chesterton was a pneumatic figure in the best sense of that word: full of air, as if under pressure, but always hovering around the Spirit.
Orthodoxy first appeared in 1908, but the circumstances surrounding the book’s first publication, and the ideas then in vogue, don’t matter a great deal for appreciating it today. That’s why we call it a classic. This is religious autobiography in the category of Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. Chesterton himself, in the book, calls it “slovenly autobiography.” His winsome spirit is there from the start. He writes, “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.” I don’t know how one can’t enjoy his company in Orthodoxy.
I like how he describes his project. Autodidacts and apologists who quote him today with tones of too much certainty should read these words again: “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.” We all have mental pictures and symbolic images that, personal to us, have formed our understanding, whether we articulate them or not.
He goes on to compare his portrait of faith to a romance. I’ve felt this too in my God searching and finding. He also defends poets, fools, and mystics; they were all easy targets for derision among the anti-religion set, then as now. All of these qualities draw me to his Orthodoxy.
Chesterton takes as basic the reality of sin—that unpopular word. It was unpopular in his day too. And to be provocative, because he loved to provoke, he writes that original sin “is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” Just look in the streets. Or the mirror.
Get ready, in fact, because he thinks and writes in aphorisms constantly. “The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.” These aphorisms can, at times, pile like one on top of another. You’ll perhaps tick or underline many, and score through angrily others. They give Chesterton’s prose its jackhammer.
I won’t repeat his arguments as if to agree with them, because I often don’t. For example, he appeals to truth and faith and divine reason (not to mention morality and order) in ways that often make me want to knock them off their pedestals as much as devote my life to them. But you should decide for yourself. That’s the point.
Try reading this book as if you’re listening to a friend talk over a pint in the pub. He loves the talk, the pint, and the conversation as much as he wants to convince you that he’s correct. It is the conversation and the process, that doesn’t end, that matters most.
After all, he tells you, “One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.”
—Jon M. Sweeney, author of St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Merton
CHAPTER 1Introduction in Defence 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) 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 honour 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 defence 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 vain-glory, 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 alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account of this happy fiasco. It might amuse a friend or an enemy to read how I gradually learnt from the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy, things that I might have learnt from my catechism—if I had ever learnt it. There may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I found at last in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church. If any one is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book. But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note naturally should, at the beginning of the book. These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles’ Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics. They are not intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed. When the word “orthodoxy” is used here it means the Apostles’ Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed. I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it. This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography. But if any one wants my opinions about the actual nature of the authority, Mr. G. S. Street has only to throw me another challenge, and I will write him another book.
Copyright © 2022 by Jon M. Sweeney
