Orthodoxy

Summary

Orthodoxy (1908) is G. K. Chesterton's account of how he came to believe the Christian creed. It answers a challenge from the critic G. S. Street, who, after Chesterton's Heretics (1905) had criticized the philosophies of his contemporaries, said he would begin to worry about his own philosophy when Chesterton had given his. He calls it a sort of slovenly autobiography. By orthodoxy he means the Apostles' Creed as Christendom has generally understood it. The library text is the complete Project Gutenberg edition. Chapter I, Introduction in Defence of Everything Else, offers the parable of an English yachtsman who sets out to discover a new island and lands, without knowing it, on the coast of England. So Chesterton tried to found a heresy of his own and found it was orthodoxy. Chapter II, The Maniac, argues that the madman is not one who has lost his reason but one who has lost everything except his reason, reasoning perfectly inside a small circle. The materialist and the determinist, he says, resemble him. Poets do not go mad; chess-players and mathematicians may; and the ordinary man stays sane by allowing mystery, as the cross opens outward where the circle closes. Chapter III, The Suicide of Thought, describes a modern scepticism that turns reason against itself and a worship of will, in Nietzsche and Shaw, that cannot choose anything in particular. Chapter IV, The Ethics of Elfland, is the heart of the book. From fairy tales learned in the nursery Chesterton draws his first convictions: that the world is a wonder and not a necessity, that joy often hangs on a condition, like Cinderella's midnight, and that the repetitions of nature may be the delight of a God who says to the sun each morning, do it again. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Chapter V, The Flag of the World, asks how one can love the world enough to change it, rejecting both optimism and pessimism for a loyalty like patriotism, and contrasts the suicide, who insults all things, with the martyr. Chapter VI, The Paradoxes of Christianity, recounts how he found Christianity attacked for opposite faults at once, and concluded that the Church combines furious opposites, such as pride and humility, courage and meekness, by keeping both at full strength. Orthodoxy becomes a heavenly chariot thundering through the ages, reeling but erect. Chapter VII, The Eternal Revolution, argues that real progress needs a fixed ideal and that the doctrine of the Fall keeps reform perpetually alive. Chapter VIII, The Romance of Orthodoxy, holds that orthodox doctrine, not liberal theology, has guarded liberty and adventure. Chapter IX, Authority and the Adventurer, explains why he accepts the Church as a living teacher and ends with joy as the gigantic secret of the Christian and the suggestion that Christ concealed his mirth. Published by John Lane in 1908, fourteen years before Chesterton entered the Catholic Church, Orthodoxy has remained one of the most widely read works of English Christian apologetics.

Top Lessons

• Reason needs a larger world than reason

  Chesterton's maniac reasons flawlessly inside a closed circle. Sanity, he argues, is not more logic but a wider horizon that leaves room for mystery, so that a person can laugh, doubt himself, and accept things he cannot fully explain. This is why he says that mysticism keeps men sane.

• Wonder and gratitude as the beginning of philosophy

  In The Ethics of Elfland Chesterton claims that fairy tales taught him more truly than scientists that the world is astonishing and need not have been. Joy often comes with a condition, and the condition should be kept rather than resented. Gratitude for existence, he says, is the first response the world calls for.

• Holding opposites together

  Chapter VI argues that Christianity does not find a dull middle between opposite virtues but holds both at full strength: a courage that wants to live and is ready to die, a humility about oneself and a high view of man. Chesterton thinks the heresies are each a single truth taken alone.

• Loving the world enough to change it

  In The Flag of the World Chesterton insists that reform must begin in loyalty, as a patriot loves his country before he improves it. The optimist excuses everything and the pessimist condemns everything; the Christian loves the world without worshipping it, and so can fight for it.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Chapter II, The Maniac, is one of the best-known literary meditations on madness in English apologetics and is of real interest to a psychiatric reader. Chesterton's madman is not delirious or deficient but rigidly logical: his explanation of the world is complete and unanswerable within a small circle, he is unable to doubt himself, and he cannot laugh at his idea. This portrait echoes the nineteenth-century idea of monomania and the reasoning madness described by asylum writers, and it anticipates later clinical interest in the fixed, internally coherent delusion; it should be read as a moral and philosophical image, not a clinical description. Chesterton draws repeatedly on Hanwell, the large Middlesex county asylum in west London, as a byword, and remarks that alienists, however quietly they work, must be intolerant of the patient's system in order to cure him, comparing cure to exorcism. Chapters III and V treat suicide philosophically, as the end point of thought that destroys itself and as the ultimate refusal of loyalty to existence, in contrast to martyrdom; these are theological judgments rather than medical ones.

• Chapter II, The Maniac (opening)

  Conversation with a publisher about self-confidence, prompted by an omnibus marked Hanwell; belief in oneself as a sign of insanity.

• Chapter II, The Maniac

  The madman's argument described as a perfect but narrow circle that cannot be broken by reasoning, with examples of the man who thinks himself Christ or the target of a conspiracy.

• Chapter II, The Maniac

  Remarks on doctors and psychologists who must treat a madman's system intolerantly, and the comparison of cure to casting out a devil.

• Chapter V, The Flag of the World

  Suicide contrasted with martyrdom as the refusal of loyalty to existence.