Orthodoxy: With Annotations and Guided Reading by Trevin Wax

Table of Contents

Introduction to G. K. Chesterton and Orthodoxy

Preface

1. Introduction: In Defence of Everything Else

2. The Maniac

3. The Suicide of Thought

4. The Ethics of Elfland

5. The Flag of the World

6. The Paradoxes of Christianity

7. The Eternal Revolution

8. The Romance of Orthodoxy

9. Authority and the Adventurer

Orthodoxy: With Annotations and Guided Reading by Trevin Wax

Copyright © 2022 by Trevin Wax

Published by B&H Academic

Nashville, Tennessee

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5359-9567-2

DEWEY: 239

SUBHD: CHRISTIANITY / THEOLOGY, DOCTRINAL / APOLOGETICS

Scripture quotations are taken from the Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.

Cover design by Ligia Teodosiu. Cover pattern by Kloroform/Creative Market.

Printed in the United States of America

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Dedication

To my mother

INTRODUCTION TO G. K. CHESTERTON AND ORTHODOXY

Where should we start when considering Gilbert Keith Chesterton? I struggle to describe him, beyond the general description of writer. What kind of writer was he? He wrote poetry, perhaps best represented in The Ballad of the White Horse and Lepanto. But he was much more than a poet. He also wrote works of philosophy, apologetics, and history—often debating with the luminaries of his time, whether in person or on the page.

Should we begin with his art and literary criticism, of which his Charles Dickens is considered a classic, that introduced him to larger audiences? Or maybe his travelogues that contained his observations of different cultures? Some would point to the novels he wrote; the mind-bending The Man Who Was Thursday stands out. Chesterton’s friend and intellectual opponent George Bernard Shaw thought highest of Chesterton’s plays and always wished he would lean more into his identity as a playwright. But Chesterton was too busy as editor of a newsweekly, while dictating books on economics, culture, and society. Above all, he wrote essays—thousands of them over a period of nearly four decades, appearing in newspaper columns worldwide. First and foremost, Chesterton saw himself as a journalist. Interestingly, a century later, he is best known not for his essays but his detective stories, most notably Father Brown.

Not knowing how best to describe Chesterton’s prolific output, I turn to an accidental work of the great writer, a work never intended for publication: Platitudes Undone. This rare book is a facsimile edition of Platitudes in the Making published in 1911 by Holbrook Jackson, a disciple of Nietzsche and Fabian socialism. Jackson communicated his progressive wisdom through a collection of short and memorable statements, properly categorized for the readers of his day. In celebration of the book’s release, he sent a copy to Chesterton, who, with a green pencil, proceeded to work his way through Jackson’s book, commenting on nearly every one of the platitudes.

A few of my favorites:

As soon as an idea is accepted, it is time to reject it.No: it is time to build another idea on it. You are always rejecting if you build nothing.

Truth is one’s own conception of things.The Big Blunder. All thought is an attempt to discover if one’s own conception is true or not.

No opinion matters finally: except your own.Said the man who thought he was a rabbit.

Don’t think—do!Do think! Do!

Every custom was once an eccentricity; every idea was once an absurdity.No, no, no. Some ideas were always absurdities. This is one of them.

Doubt is the prerogative of the intellect; Faith, of the emotions. Nowadays the emotions have all the Doubt and the intellect all the Faith.The mind exists not to doubt but to decide.

The great revolution of the future will be Nature’s revolt against man.I hope Man will not hesitate to shoot.

Love is protective only when it is free.Love is never free.

Chesterton tested the platitudes of his age with countercultural thought and humor. Slogans and sayings, new terms and shifts in language, ideas that gain a foothold and then spread throughout our society—he believed all of them should be put to the test of deliberative evaluation. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton’s most famous work of apologetics (The Everlasting Man is probably his best apologetic book), we see this countercultural thought on display, with writing that sparkles with wit and wisdom and wonder.

G. K. Chesterton’s Impact

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in England. He lived from 1874 to 1936. In the 1890s, while a student at the Slade School of Art, he experienced a period of profound pessimism and despair, due in part to the philosophical currents swirling about during that time. In his autobiography he describes himself plunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide before he revolted: I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks. Groping his way toward a mental equilibrium based on a foundational first principle—that existence is better than nonexistence—Chesterton emerged from this experience and began to write. He began his career in 1900 and married Frances Blogg a year later. He wrote more than fifteen million words in his lifetime.

Chesterton’s impact was and still is significant. In C. S. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis commented on his first encounter with Chesterton’s writing: In reading Chesterton . . . I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. Chesterton’s work became part of Lewis’s journey to faith. I had never heard of him and had no idea of what he stood for, Lewis wrote, nor can I quite understand why he made such an immediate conquest of me. It might have been expected that my pessimism, my atheism, and my hatred of sentiment would have made him to me the least congenial of all authors. . . . Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love. Lewis, the author famous for Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia, considered Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man to be the very best popular defense of the full Christian position I know.

Chesterton’s influence was significant among other key figures of the twentieth century. Mahatma Gandhi translated one of Chesterton’s essays in the Illustrated London News, an essay he described as leaving him thunderstruck, which later influenced his book Hind Swaraj, a key source for inspiring the movement to end British rule in India.

Of Chesterton, T. S. Eliot wrote: If I were to state his essential quality, I would say that it is a sort of triumphant common sense—a joyous acclaim toward the splendor and the powers of the soul.¹

Marshall McLuhan, the respected Canadian philosopher and commentator on media theory and the influence of technology, wrote: He is original in the only possible sense, because he considers everything in relation to its origin.²

Scott Randall Paine claims that the uniqueness of Chesterton lies in precisely his fusion of the philosophical with the rhetorical, the imaginative and even the charitable. Perhaps the fullness of these harmonized endowments could best be captured by saying that he possessed an Augustinian imagination, a Thomistic intellect, and a Franciscan heart.³

We could multiply the tributes to Chesterton issued from his contemporaries and from leaders today. I submit just one more, from H. L. Mencken, a man who stood opposed to Christianity yet acknowledged Orthodoxy was the best argument for Christianity I have ever read—and I have gone through, I suppose, fully a hundred.⁴ It is to Orthodoxy that we now turn.

Brief Background on Orthodoxy

Dale Ahlquist, president of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, says, "If you only read one book by Chesterton—well then shame on you—but if you only read one book by Chesterton, it has to be Orthodoxy. (However, if you read only Orthodoxy, you had better read it more than once.)"⁵ I agree. This is the best entry point into Chesterton’s work, especially if you are most interested in Chesterton’s role as an apologist for the Christian faith.

How did Orthodoxy come about? Chesterton’s parents were nominally religious, baptizing Chesterton as an Anglican although they held to Unitarian beliefs. Once Chesterton emerged from a period of pessimism in the late 1890s, his philosophy of life became increasingly visible in his writing. In the early 1900s, he took part in a long-running debate over religion with Robert Blatchford of the Clarion. The debate focused primarily on theism against determinism; he did not delve into the particulars of the Christian creed.

In 1905, Heretics was released—a book that featured Chesterton’s interaction with many of the leading thinkers of his day. In chapter after chapter, Chesterton argued with his contemporaries, combining the sharpness of intellect and stylistic verve that readers had come to appreciate in him. Heretics caused a stir, but to Chesterton’s dismay many leading thinkers treated it superficially, as if his dazzling wit and rhetorical skill were merely a game for entertainment purposes. In 1937 Émile Cammaerts wrote of Chesterton’s opponents:

They talked of his brilliant fireworks and of his delightful paradoxes when he was delivering his soul to them. They treated him as a conjurer when he spoke with the earnestness of a prophet, when his juggling was as sacred to him as a prayer, as the juggling of the juggler of Notre-Dame. They said that he dazzled them when he tried to open their eyes, and that he deafened them when he tried to open their ears. They confused the act and its motive, the words and the intention which dictated them.⁶

One of the reviewers of Heretics issued a challenge: the writer claimed he would consider his own philosophy of life only if Chesterton was willing to disclose his. Chesterton had critiqued contemporary philosophies, but he had not yet done the work of revealing his own. Orthodoxy was the book that came as a result. Chesterton was just thirty-four.

First published in 1908, Orthodoxy has never been out of print. It is a dated work, dealing in the categories and concerns of Chesterton’s contemporaries, acknowledges Matthew Lee Anderson, "and yet it comes nearer to timelessness than anything we have today. Though Orthodoxy was written near the start of the 20th century, I have dubbed it the most important book for the 21st."⁷

How to Read Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is not a typical work of apologetics. It is the chronicle of an intellectual journey. In it, Chesterton describes a quest to found a new religion, a philosophy of life that will include everything that makes most sense of the world. Once he arrives at the end of his journey, he realizes the religion and its philosophy already exist. It is Christianity.

Orthodoxy is not an easy book. One reason it can be difficult at times is because of the historical and temporal distance between Chesterton and us. Unlike his initial readers, we are not familiar with many of the people and places he mentions. But the biggest reason that Orthodoxy can be a challenge is that you are reading one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed, according to Étienne Gilson, the renowned Thomist scholar.⁸ Orthodoxy is a workout for the mind. You will walk away feeling worn out as well as invigorated. If at first you feel more of the former than the latter, you’re not alone.

The good news is there’s no reason Orthodoxy has to be harder to read than it should be. I’ve done what I can to lessen the more challenging aspects of this book. For example, in line with the custom of the day, Chesterton wrote in lengthy paragraphs, sometimes spanning one or two pages. In order to enhance readability, I have inserted paragraph breaks and headings, so that the flow of Chesterton’s argument becomes easier to discern. (I realize that inserting paragraph breaks and headings requires a judgment call in interpretation, but I trust that longtime readers of Orthodoxy who might disagree with some of my choices will still appreciate my efforts to make Chesterton more accessible to contemporary readers.) I have also updated the spelling in a number of instances.

Throughout the text, I’ve added annotations that give more detail on the people, events, and scriptural references Chesterton mentions. I sought to be more comprehensive than sparing in order to make the book more accessible to readers of all levels and backgrounds. My goal is to get you reading Chesterton without feeling so overwhelmed by his general knowledge and expertise that you give up. (That said, once I’ve left a note explaining who a certain person is, I do not leave another note about the same person if Chesterton mentions him or her again later in the text. You’re on your own!)

As a sidenote, if you were to read articles or books on just the people Chesterton mentions in this book, you’d get a crash course in England’s history as well as the leading philosophies just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. In this way, reading Chesterton is like entering a new world, or, better said, it’s entering our world with a trustworthy guide whose knowledge covers the terrain of history, philosophy, and theology.

I’ve been brief in my comments to each chapter on because I do not want to delay your getting into Chesterton’s work by adding my own. My comments are designed to help you understand the lay of the land, so you can discern the pathways of Chesterton’s brilliant mind and be able to follow the argument. I leave a few memorable parts to look for at the outset as well, so that you’ll keep your eyes open for the areas of Orthodoxy that are most notable.

At the end of each chapter, my summaries intend to do just that—summarize what Chesterton has said, in order to make it easier to move forward to the next chapter and not forget what has gone before. Like any exercise routine or mountain-climbing endeavor, you’re better off enlisting a partner or two than trying on your own. For this reason, I’ve included discussion questions at the end of each chapter to facilitate good conversation around the central aspects of Chesterton’s work.

Orthodoxy feels at times like a cross between looking for golden nuggets in a dense jungle and whirling around on a roller coaster. Enjoy the ride. Keep the treasure.

PREFACE

This book is meant to be a companion to Heretics, ⁹ and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called Heretics because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. The writer has been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset Newman in writing his Apologia; ¹⁰ he has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere. While everything else may be different, the motive in both cases is the same.

It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer’s own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

ONE

The first chapter of Orthodoxy is the shortest (and easiest to read). Chesterton sets out by introducing the purpose of this book and by giving us one of his most famous parables: the tale of the yachtsman. Fans of the late singer/songwriter Rich Mullins might recognize in the song Creed a few lines inspired by Chesterton’s introduction. The lyricist wrote of his conviction that it was what he believed that made him who he was. He didn’t make himself, the song says; his beliefs were making him. It was the Word of God—the very truth of God—and not any human invention. In other words, the lyrics seem to say, it was no man-made philosophy that shaped the songwriter, but God’s own Word, which the singer had embraced and which was continually shaping his character.†

Chesterton’s goal in this chapter is to explain his approach and rationale for the book, and also to introduce humanity’s double spiritual need to be happy in the world but not completely comfortable in it—to be astonished at this world and yet feel welcome here. In seeking to solve the riddle of why we have this double need, Chesterton set out to discover and propound a new philosophy, only to find it was Christian orthodoxy.

Memorable Parts to Look For

The parable of the yachtsman

Humanity’s double spiritual need

† Rich Mullins and Beaker, Creed, in Mullins, A Liturgy, a Legacy, & a Ragamuffin Band, Reunion, 1993, studio album.

Introduction: 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. Street¹¹) 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.¹² 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.

The Man in the Yacht

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,¹³ 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.

Answering a Double Spiritual Need

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.

My Discovery of Orthodoxy

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