This book, read carefully, is tough sledding but well worth it. Despite being only ~200 pages, the book is dense with thought and riddled with sentences that demand to be paused and pondered after. That it prefigures C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity is readily apparent (in fact, the title of Lewis’ famous book comes from a line in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy), though in many ways I find the thoughts here more original and, often, better articulated.

It is a deeply personal book, despite its theological rigor, and I found it alternatingly insightful and infuriating. The book did not change my mind on orthodoxy, but it did take to task many of the errors of reasoning that have led us to such a spiritually impoverished world, despite our potential for so much more.

I try to separate the wheat from the chaff below in what I’m taking and leaving:

Take It

• The Double Spiritual Need – Chesterton’s problem statement is that humans are challenged by existence with a dual and seemingly incommensurable needs. On the one hand, we need security, safety, and a home base from which we can orient ourselves toward the world. On the other, we need excitement, adventure, and the thrill of discovery. Chesterton’s spiritual journey was motivated by asking: “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” (5).
  
  This seems like accurate enough and has resonance with Thomas Nagel’s idea of the absurd. In general, Chesterton’s willingness to embrace paradoxes rather than try to dissolve them is both the book’s greatest strength and its best argument for the merits of orthodoxy.
  
  
  
• Modesty and the Limits of Empiricism – Chesterton spends much of the first half of the book calling for a more modest epistemology, suggesting that an idea’s truth might be less reliant on its empirical verifiability and rather more on its impact on human flourishing. Writing at a time when logical positivism was just gaining steam, Chesterton sees not just the emptiness of the materialist worldview but its error as well. “Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true” (13). (Here he echoes Nietzsche, a thinker he has a ton in common with, despite his relentless abuse of Nietzsche throughout the book.)
  
  I don’t feel the same antipathy toward empiricism that Chesterton seems to feel, but I do agree that the flaw of the empiricists is nearly always their certainty. If nothing else, the Problem of Induction leaves all empirical claims open to doubt, but I also agree with Chesterton’s view that the verifiable truth view of the world is a rather boring one–high in utility but low in power.
  
  “As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. […] we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out” (25). Chesterton’s victory is not to deny empiricism but to circumscribe its role: in dealing with internal combustion engines, it is essential; in dealing with matters of art, meaning, and spiritual need, it is wholly inadequate. “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits” (18).
  
  Finally, Chesterton does a decent job of showing the narrowness of empirical thinking and fairly contrasting it with the Christian worldview. “The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle” (27). The fact that most Christians today come up short in this openness is, Chesterton argues, an error of application but not of doctrine.
  
  
  
• Wonder and the Embrace of Mysticism – Chesterton’s project is largely one of laying down his certainty and rediscovering a sense of wonder
  
  Where I most agree with Chesterton is where his insistence on mysticism is less an insistence on a particular dogma (Catholicism) and more closely related to the epistemic modesty described above. For Chesterton, concepts like faith and mysticism begin as a placeholder, as an acknowledgment of the limits of human understanding.
  
  “The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid” (32).
  
  In this way, Chesterton’s embrace of mysticism is an answer to Double Spiritual Need, as it provides the security of order without the dullness of supposed complete understanding. It is Chesterton’s rich and enticing vision of a more child-like and aesthetically-oriented approach to life that, in the end, I found appealing. It seems more pleasant, and in matters of ethics, we have to take such intuitions seriously.
  
  

Leave It

As you should expect of theology book written in 1908, there’s a lot to quibble with in Orthodoxy. I’ll be briefer in this section, as it’s not my intent to take Chesterton to task on every point of disagreement; rather, I’ll just highlight a few of particular interest.

• Democracy as the Christian Political Philosophy – Yes, there is a certain emphasis on individualism in Christianity, but if anyone can find the section of the New Testament wherein Jesus discusses majority rule or parliamentary procedure, please point me to it. Here, more than on any other point, Chesterton is a product of his historical era. With the feeling of being under siege by Socialism, military dictatorships, and other early-20th-century political problems, he has turned into a bit of a propagandist on behalf of both Democracy and Capitalism. This is the major problem with the book, and much of its second half is ruined by bizarre patriotic fervor.
  
  
  
• Arguments from Analogy – This fallacy is the Achilles heel of C.S. Lewis, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to see several instances where Chesterton’s analogies failed to track. The most notable is his watch/watchmaker-style argument for the existence of God toward the end of Chapter Four: “I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a storyteller” (82). Again, there are many other subtle logical sleights of hand in the book, and Chesterton is so convincing in many sections that I had trouble keeping my guard up at times.
  
  
  
• Underestimation of Context – Of course a book called Orthodoxy must, at times, deal in absolutes, but Chesterton’s zeal goes too far for me at times. When he claims that “What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century” (105), a contemporary reader must wince to know what lies in the century ahead and how it will change human thought forever, including what is possible to believe. This is one of a few cases in which Chesterton’s epistemic modesty trends dangerously into dogmatic territory.
  
  
  
• Supposed Disagreements with Nietzsche – How an intellectual can write “Insofar as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority, we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come of with it.” (43) and still take up arms against Nietzsche in nearly every chapter is beyond my understanding. The book is peppered with quotes like this, where one could easily mistake the author for Nietzsche himself.
  
  It’s trivial in the grand scheme of the book, but it’s disappointing. I’ve never read a religious thinker that I felt dealt with Nietzsche fairly, preferring instead to straw man his arguments. Chesterton would have been up to the task intellectually, so I hate to miss the chance to see him do it well.

Conclusion

There is so much more that is interesting in this book. While I can’t recommend it to someone who has no theological interest at all, I would not confine the book by calling it a work of Apologetics. I’m glad I spent the required time with it and am looking forward to reading more Chesterton, particularly his writings on Shakespeare.

Page references from the hardcover Trevin Wax edition of Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.