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Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton First published in 1908 at age 35
I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather that in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. 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. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is the 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. ...But nearly all people... would agree we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths. ...I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. ...I did not try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. ...Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. ...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. The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. ...Nevertheless he is wrong. ...his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. ...In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. ...Just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers. ...They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far. Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity. ...It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. It is possible to meet the skeptic who believes that everything began in himself. ...For his own friends are a mythology made up by himself. ...The man, believing in nothing and in no man, is alone in his own nightmare. ...The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. ...The chief mark of and element of insanity; ...is reason used without root, reason in the void. The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary many has always been a mystic. ...He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.
For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind. ...That peril is that human intellect is free to destroy itself. Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about. If [evolution] means anything more [than]... an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about... It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. Then there is the opposite attack on thought: ...that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. ...Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. ...If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? There is an extreme view of [pragmatism] which involves the absence of all truth whatsoever. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. One school of thinkers... see that reason destroys but Will, they say, creates. ...But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that is an action. By praise of will you cannot really choose one course better than another. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. Here I end... the first and dullest business of this book - the rough review of modern thought. ...In front of me... is a pile of modern books... a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility.
Now, I have to put together a general position... by writing down... three or four fundamental ideas which I have found for myself. Then I shall roughly synthesize them, summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion. 1. The things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. ...I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts. Scientific men... talk as if they had found not only a set of marvelous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. ...This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this. ...We all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. There were, then, these two first feelings, indefensible and indisputable. The world was a shock, but it was not merely shocking; existence was a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise. 2. ..There enters the second great principle of the fairy philosophy. ...I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. ...The vision always hangs upon a veto. All dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. ...Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a command... that she should be back by twelve. ...Existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. ...I have explained that fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first that this world is a wild and startling place; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations. 3. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea. ...I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in a stricter sense that they were willful. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose, there is a person. 4. The size of the scientific universe gave no novelty, no relief. ...But I was frightfully fond of the universe... . For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. ...Life is not only a pleasure but kind of an eccentric privilege. 5. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "Robinson Crusoe." ...The greatest of poem is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. ...But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: every thing has been saved from a wreck. ...But I really felt... as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship.
When you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. ...This at least had come to be my position about all that was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other an produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return in the evening. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it. ...On this system one could fight all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence. And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection - the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world... I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like sort of a hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and made the world separate from himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole of the world - it had evidently meant to go there - and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. ...Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. ...I knew now why... I could feel homesick at home.
6. The Paradoxes of Christianity I was a pagan at age twelve, and a complete agnostic by age of sixteen. ...As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith... a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind - the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. ...It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. ...Christianity, it seemed was the mother of wars. ...What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? ...It looked... as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad - in various ways. Nevertheless it could not, I felt be quite true that Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. ...We want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. ...Orthodox theology has specifically insisted that Christ was... both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God. All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium. ...But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. ...That was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way. Courage is almost a contradiction of terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ...He must seek his life in a furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. ...In so far as I am a man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. ...One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul. By defining its main doctrine, the church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence. ...All that the church did (so far as that goes) was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other. ...The church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. There never was anything so perilous of so exciting as orthodoxy. ...It
is easy to be a heretic. ...It is always easy to be a modernist. To have
fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration... would
indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity
of angles at which one falls. ...But to have avoided them all has been
one whirling adventure.
Some satisfaction is needed even to make things better. But what do we mean by making things better? It will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that... there is no principle in nature. ...Nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. ...Some fall back simply on the clock; they talk as if mere passage through time brought some superiority. ...Some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still. Nature is going to something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. ...This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed; it must be fixed. ..."My ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world. My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is call Eden." ...I paused to note the new coincidence of Christianity. I passed on to the next necessity of any ideal of progress. Some people... seem to believe in an automatic impersonal progress in the nature of things. ...The world might conceivably be working towards one consummation, but hardly towards any particular arrangement of qualities. ..The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. ...Is it not quite clear that what we really hope for is one particular management and proposition of these two things; a certain amount of restraint and respect, a certain amount of energy and mastery? ...This then is our second requirement for the ideal of progress... it must be composite. ...It must be artistically combined like a picture. ...and the church answered, "Mine is quite literally a picture, for I know who painted it." Then I went on to the third thing which... was needed for an utopia or goal of progress. ...We need watchfulness even in Utopia, lest we fall. ...This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn oppressive is the third fact. ...I am entirely on the side of the revolutionists. They are really right to be always suspecting human institutions. ...And then I caught my breath again: for I remembered that I was once again on the side of the orthodox. ..."Christianity spoke again and said; "I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders." All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully,
for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again
I seem to hear... "You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures
when you get up to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest
adventure is to get there."
8. The Romance of Christianity I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles that to believe in them. ...The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it. ...But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly more liberal for doing so; because they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. ...It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and immanence. And it is just here that Christianity is on the side of humanity and liberty and love. ...God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her [Christianity's] instinct to say "little children love one another" rather than to tell one large person to love himself. ...Sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed. The Christian... is separate from things and staring at them in astonishment. But... the Buddhist saint... since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can hardly be astonished at itself. ...There is no real possibility of getting out of pantheism any special impulse to moral action. For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good as another. ..By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation - Christendom. In the deep mater of the Trinity... the heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by... the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads with justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For western religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not well for man to be alone." The social instinct asserted itself everywhere. ...If this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian. To the Buddhist or eastern fatalist existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. ...A story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. ...The author of all things went not only through agony, but through doubt. ...In a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. ...The world shook at... the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. ...Only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist. These can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy, of which chief
merit is that it is the natural fountain of revolution and reform. ...Its
main advantage is that it is the most adventurous and manly of all theologies.
Its main disadvantage is simply that it is a theology.
9. Authority and the Adventurer "Why cannot you simply take what is good in Christianity, what you can define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest?" The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions. ...I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. ..It is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. ...The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion. "Give me an explanation, first of the towering eccentricity of man among brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy in countries of the Catholic Church." ...One explanation... covers all three... Once Heaven came upon the earth with a power or seal called the image of God, whereby man took control of nature; and once again... Heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man. Instead at looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account... of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging around tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy. That my own case for Christianity is rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. ...But among these million facts all flowing one way there is... one question... to be treated briefly; I mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural. ...The believers in miracles accept them... because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them... because they have a doctrine against them. ...The skeptic always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed. I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to the faith. ...That the Christian Church is its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me tomorrow. ...The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living church... is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. ...This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. |