Orthodoxy

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant defence of the Christian faith.
Review: This book is Chesterton's defence of orthodox Christianity. It is partly autobiographical, in the sense that Chesterton describes various insights into the nature of reality, and various puzzles about reality, and then shows how (to his astonishment) the Christian faith accounts for the insights and answers the puzzles.

The following quote expresses this idea:

"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. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right, like my father in the garden."

But don't just take my word for it! You can read it online from the G.K.Chesterton web page and then buy the book!

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, humorous, intelligent, and full of surprises
Review: Portly, fun loving, witty G.K. Chesterton decided to write this book as a companion volume to his book HERETICS. Since HERETICS had criticised contemporary philosophies, ORTHODOXY was written to present an alternative viewpoint, and is therefore both affirmative in tone and autobiographical in many places. A sampling of his chapter titles gives some idea of Chesterton's sense of fun as well as his unusual approach to the matter of Christianity. Chapter one is "In Defense of Everything Else" (one pictures Chesterton with a whimsical, impish smile on his face as he wrote this). There are also chapters on "The Suicide of Thought", "The Ethics of Elfland" (a really superb chapter), "The Maniac", and "The Paradoxes of Christianity". In this easily readable book (only 160 pages in the small paperback edition), Chesterton shows that theological reflections and philosophical ruminations need be neither boring nor incomprehensible. This was jolly good fun to read, being both funny and intellectually stimulating. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A classic every believer should read...
Review: Some books are timeless classics. In the world of Christian classics Orthodoxy is one of them. It is G. K. Chesterton's account of his search for authentic Christianity in the midst of the conflicting voices of the modern world. So it is both deeply theological and also personal, even quirky, in its critical review of the various other, opposing approaches to life.

Chesterton was a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy, H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Much of what he writes is "in answer" to them and their divergent views of the meaning of life.

Chesterton came to a deeply held Christian faith that took its outward expression in his 1922 conversion to Roman Catholicism. Today, Chesterton is best remembered as the creator of the "Father Brown" detective stories, but he was a prolific writer, penning studies of Robert Browning (1903) and Charles Dickens (1906), novels including The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), poems, collected in 1927 and essays, collected in Tremendous Trifles (1909) and Come to Think of It (1930).

In the opening chapter of Orthodoxy, Chesterton "eliminates the competition" by skewering competing world-view theories, showing their warts and all. He then describes flawed approaches to life that will lead to despair, in the second chapter, "The Suicide of Thought." Having put erroneous views to rest, for the remainder of the book he describes the central truths of Christianity as the only correct way of understanding creation and human life.

Chesterton portrays himself as one who has traveled all around the world, only to have arrived at home again as if it were some new and strange land. "Home" being the traditions of Christian faith. Such a journey may seem unnecessary, but you will agree that same paradox appears in everything from Dorothy's journey in the "Wizard of Oz" to T. S. Eliot in "Little Gidding." It is the way of human kind, according to Chesterton, to seek and to find-even if what is found was "there all along." (A fact echoed in Chesterton's dedication of the book "To My Mother").

Those who read Orthodoxy will travel with Chesterton as guide-which may be the best way to go, because he is an amusing intellectual companion who has trod that way before.

Philip Yancey wrote the foreword to this edition and claims this book transformed his Christian understanding. If that is not enough to tempt you to read it, perhaps this quotation will: "The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable... It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own." (page 149).

Chesterton has been called been called "the prince of paradox" because his theology is often robed in a light, energetic, rapid-paced and whimsical style. This was brought about to no small degree by his custom of dictating all of his writings. (A custom, we might note, shared by none other than the Apostle Paul).

Rating:
Summary: Curious, Brilliant Apologetics
Review: Orthodoxy is not the book I thought it would be. I really expected a rigorous, systematic defence of orthodox doctrine. Instead, I read a rousing autobiography, which left me in continued awe of the author, but rather bemused about Chesterton's mental habits.

First off, Chesterton in relation to various heresies (in particular secularism), is a bit like a drunken man with a sledgehammer in a china shop. Not an angry drunk, but a happy, wild-eyed, well-practiced drunk. Chesterton's intellect so thoroughly overpowers the counterarguments that he sometimes seems at a loss as to which direction to swing the hammer. So he muddles cheerfully along, smashing a bit of Nietzchism here, crushing a Socialist argument there. And through it all he seems painfully aware of the oncoming post-modern society, in which the ultimate secular virtue of tolerance would leave us oblivious to rational argument.

Orthodoxy is replete with classic Chesterton. He makes his points with precise metaphors that waste no words. A particular favorite of mine is his argument against the relativist effort to remove value from physical or abstract objects. Chesterton cites the title of a work called "the Love of Triangles" and points out that if Triangles are loved for anything, they are loved for being triangular.

As with The Everlasting Man, Chesterton provides his readers with a neat intellectual trick that can be used for self-analysis. In Orthodoxy, the trick is the reduction of conversation to monosyllabic sentences. Chesterton has found another key characteristic of the modern world here - the tendency of people to adopt a complex language for the express intent of not saying anything at all. Anyone familiar with the sciences will understand the necessity of precision in language, combined with the maddening inability of the words themselves to convey the desired meaning. As an example, I refer to isotactic, syndiotactic, and atactic polymers. These terms refer to the pattern of orientation in polymer chains. Is it possible to infer that from the terminology? Our language is full of adopted "scientific" nomenclature that contains meaning of which we are unaware. One of these days, I'm going to state a hyperthesis and wait for someone to point out my spelling error.

But I digress. Chesterton's recognition is that the more complex our language, and the more specialized its application, the less meaning the language itself conveys. Witness the confusion over the terms "liberal" and "progressive," cited by Chesterton as examples. Anyone familiar with the modern (American" connotations of these words will recognize that "liberal" is someone who wants to limit free speech, have government control over the economy, mandate the membership of the Boy Scouts, and dictate how many gallons of water can be contained in your toilet tank. Progressive is simply someone who wants to progress back to the 60's. The meanings of the words are a far cry from the definition of the words.

Chesterton supplies the antidote - one syllable words only. While this is obviously of limited utility, it's a nice exercise (like trying to cook breakfast using only your left hand, if you're right handed). His point is well taken - the one-syllable words are pretty hard to confuse or confute, and they're remarkably handy. They're also anathema to wordy people like me.

I cannot, of course, help compare Chesterton's autobiographical Orthodoxy with Augustine's Confessions. I shudder to think that it is the different audiences that define the difference in these books, but in any case here is a contrast between a brilliant ancient writer and a brilliant modern writer, both explaining how they came to accept Christ and His Church. Where Augustine is expansive, structured, precise and deeply interested in addressing each of the many ways we might consider the phenomenon of "memory," Chesterton is rambling, concise, and chaotic in his visualization of madness and genius.

Finally (yes! Finally!) I have to admit that I remain unconvinced of Chesterton's hyperthesis of sanity. Where Chesterton sees sanity as the result of a tension between two extremes (in fact, two poles), I suspect that it is such tension that generally "cracks" people's heads (in most cases the tension between perceived reality and reality-by-policy).

Chesterton, however, will get the better of me with such arguments as: "To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything is a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. 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."

Magnificent!

Rating:
Summary: A detective's romance
Review: Before his series of Father Brown mysteries, G.K. Chesterton wrote "Orthodoxy," an autobiographical 'detective' story of how he came to believe the Christian faith. Drawing from "the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy...an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church," Mr. Chesterton playfully and inductively reasons his way toward the one worldview that best explains and preserves the phenomena in the world he found around himself.

The world around Mr. Chesterton was rife with Modernism in the early twentieth century. Based on philosophies of the late nineteenth century, religious and political traditions were being questioned. Anarchism, communism, and socialism were the parlor topics of the day; the merely symbolic importance of religion was being settled upon. These are the roots of our post-modern society today in which the meaning of nearly everything (even words, according to literary deconstructionists) is now in doubt. At one point in the chapter entitled "The Suicide of Thought," Mr. Chesterton quips, "We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." An exaggeration even today, undoubtedly. Still, we have traveled quite a distance philosophically since the era before the World Wars, and "Orthodoxy" is an excellent snapshot of where we've come from.

But be warned: This snapshot captures a lot of active thought. It took me a couple of reads over as many years to get a handle on the structure of the book, and now the rest of it has been becoming clearer to me. Part of the problem is Mr. Chesterton's writing style. There is much playfulness in his language, and a reader could mistakenly conclude that the author's reasoning relies heavily upon wordplay, the turn of a phrase to turn the tables on his opponents. It can become frustrating if one isn't careful. Mr. Chesterton himself acknowledges this impression, "Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise the most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused." But don't miss the meat for the gravy (or the salad for the dressing, as your case may be). The potency of his arguments doesn't rely on his clever semantics but on his connections between observed facts and the ancient, corresponding orthodoxy of Christianity. Mr. Chesterton has fun with words because he can, not because he needs to.

This mixture of cleverness and careful thinking ultimately leads Mr. Chesterton to this conclusion: Christian faith is well-reasoned trust in Christ. And the desire for well-reasoned trust is a "practical romance," as Mr. Chesterton calls it--a need in the ordinary person for "the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure...an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." A way to accept the knowable while looking beyond it toward what is yet to be known.

Mr. Chesterton wrote "Orthodoxy" for people looking for that kind of romance. "If anyone 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." However, this book isn't for everyone. "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." The inconvincible cannot be convinced. Yet the skeptical (such as Mr. Chesterton once was) can be because they are the doubters who're still looking around. I myself come from a skeptic's background and regard "Orthodoxy" as a plausible, if sometimes difficult to comprehend, and wonderful way someone can come to trust the claims of Christianity.

Rating:
Summary:

a "singular grace note in God's creative purpose"
Review:

Those who have read Chesterton realize that he is the sort of man with whom the world is blessed every 100 years or so. A master writer and wry philosopher, Chesterton provides in his book Orthodoxy one of the best summaries available concerning the life in Christ. Even though he found God calling him to the Church of Rome, readers from a wide range of backgrounds - evangelical Protestants of all "flavors", fundamentalists, Eastern Orthodox, Episcopalians, Baptists, Pentacostalists, Lutherans, and yes, Roman Catholics - will discover new insights into their walk with the Christ.

Chesterton has the ability to make us see things anew. In Orthodoxy, he helps us to see the Church in a new way, and he helps us to see afresh the One who founded His Church - Jesus Christ. The book is not an apologetic for Roman Catholicism, but rather one for orthodox Christianity itself.

Chesterton is simultaneously a master of the written word and one who knows his Master. To borrow a phrase (applied to something else, but applicable here) of Richard John Neuhaus, Chesterton is a "singular grace note in God's creative purpose". For those who have not read Chesterton, Orthodoxy is probably the best place to start, followed by The Everlasting Man, followed by the delighful (and insightful) Father Brown stories, followed by ...

Rating:
Summary: A detective's romance
Review: Before his series of Father Brown mysteries, G.K. Chesterton wrote "Orthodoxy," an autobiographical 'detective' story of how he came to believe the Christian faith. Drawing from "the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy...an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church," Mr. Chesterton playfully and inductively reasons his way toward the one worldview that best explains and preserves the phenomena in the world he found around himself.

The world around Mr. Chesterton was rife with Modernism in the early twentieth century. Based on philosophies of the late nineteenth century, religious and political traditions were being questioned. Anarchism, communism, and socialism were the parlor topics of the day; the merely symbolic importance of religion was being settled upon. These are the roots of our post-modern society today in which the meaning of nearly everything (even words, according to literary deconstructionists) is now in doubt. At one point in the chapter entitled "The Suicide of Thought," Mr. Chesterton quips, "We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." An exaggeration even today, undoubtedly. Still, we have traveled quite a distance philosophically since the era before the World Wars, and "Orthodoxy" is an excellent snapshot of where we've come from.

But be warned: This snapshot captures a lot of active thought. It took me a couple of reads over as many years to get a handle on the structure of the book, and now the rest of it has been becoming clearer to me. Part of the problem is Mr. Chesterton's writing style. There is much playfulness in his language, and a reader could mistakenly conclude that the author's reasoning relies heavily upon wordplay, the turn of a phrase to turn the tables on his opponents. It can become frustrating if one isn't careful. Mr. Chesterton himself acknowledges this impression, "Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise the most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused." But don't miss the meat for the gravy (or the salad for the dressing, as your case may be). The potency of his arguments doesn't rely on his clever semantics but on his connections between observed facts and the ancient, corresponding orthodoxy of Christianity. Mr. Chesterton has fun with words because he can, not because he needs to.

This mixture of cleverness and careful thinking ultimately leads Mr. Chesterton to this conclusion: Christian faith is well-reasoned trust in Christ. And the desire for well-reasoned trust is a "practical romance," as Mr. Chesterton calls it--a need in the ordinary person for "the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure...an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." A way to accept the knowable while looking beyond it toward what is yet to be known.

Mr. Chesterton wrote "Orthodoxy" for people looking for that kind of romance. "If anyone 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." However, this book isn't for everyone. "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." The inconvincible cannot be convinced. Yet the skeptical (such as Mr. Chesterton once was) can be because they are the doubters who're still looking around. I myself come from a skeptic's background and regard "Orthodoxy" as a plausible, if sometimes difficult to comprehend, and wonderful way someone can come to trust the claims of Christianity.

Rating:
Summary: It won't convince nonbelievers
Review: A Catholic friend recommended "Orthodoxy" by way of trying to justify faith. While it is a very elegant and wittily written book, I can't say it meets that mark.

"Orthodoxy" is the very personal account of G.K. Chesterton's journey to the Christian faith. But because it is so personal, it doesn't explain faith objectively, but rather only to Chesterton's satisfaction. And having reached the same conclusion as Chesterton, I'm sure it is also to the satisfaction of most believers.

It is a little frustrating to read the parts where he sets about destroying straw men, or when he proves a point by changing the argument into a semantic one. On the other hand it's a pleasure to see him pick on the likes of Nietzsche. The ultimate lesson that comes from the book, though, is the tautology that faith can't be proven, which is why many good, honest folks don't have any.

To Chesterton, life is more romantic and, indeed, livable if you accept that some things are beyond human understanding, that there is no sense in trying to explain them, and that they might as well be explained by magic. He believed that "something that we have never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves." This no doubt filled him with comfort because it would give rhyme and reason to lots of chaos in the world. But this attitude can also be interpreted as intellectual laziness, if not cowardice. It is much easier to believe, on faith, in "fairy tales" (as Chesterton proudly called them), than to accept the natural world, as inscrutable as it is, and seek valiantly to understand its mysteries before one's time is up.

So, while it is an enjoyable read, this book is likely doubly enjoyed by a believer who is looking for a reaffirmation of his faith. Non-believers will find it interesting, if undeservedly condescending.

Rating:
Summary: Let's be even-handed here
Review: Let me keep this short for the person who just wants a quick and dirty view. I realize that most readers loved this book and will defend it to the end, but to be fair the book can be hard to follow at times, i.e., the book requires a background knowledge of the late 20th century that most causual readers don't have and can be frustratingly inconsistent in terms of clarity.

The book is witty and provocative, but if you're looking for something to use to help your agnostic neighbor who's hooked on phonetics and the X-box, this book will be a big snore.

For those of us who want an apologetics change-up, it's a good read.

Rating:
Summary: FRUSTRATINGLY GOOD
Review: Chesterton's books often defy reviewing and 'Orthodoxy' is probably the prime instance of the class. The dilemma is how to praise it in a five-star mode, without burying it for its faults-I not being a skilled panegyrist or spin doctor. So, the bad news first, and I hope you bear with me.

While it is fair to say that this is a very rewarding read in the long run, I admit that even as an avid and omnivorous reader it took me about five passes to feel I grasped all of it, and I would still approach an exam question on it with trepidation. It is also dated in places, but this is trivial. Chesterton is not so much a windbag, or really repetitious, but plain garrulous. He himself admits that this is 'a sort of slovenly autobiography', and that it details the intellectual and emotional path that brought him to the orthodoxy of the church and the Apostles' Creed in a 'set of pictures rather than a series of deductions'. Even worse, our genial genius says that he sets out to write all this personal history of theology and soul-forming for 'any average reader'. It is true. He uses very few difficult terms and technicalities. But you cannot study this like a textbook or read it like a novel, unless it be taken as on odd species of the stream of consciousness type. He does not so much write as think out loud on the paper. It requires that you absorb his meaning by a sort of spiritual osmosis. And of course to do that you have to open your heart as well as your mind, which implies considerable trust in the author. An element of humility helps, as well as some patience. Is that brainwashing? In no way: the whole time you have the option to disagree or stop reading. After all, (as he would say), it is only a book which enables you to meet the author by your own free will.

That said, it is a happy and good-hearted story as much as an intellectual odyssey. Everyone who successfully writes a book of this type succeeds in a very personal style. (Augustine's 'Confessions' and C.S. Lewis's 'Pilgrim's Regress' spring to mind.) Chesterton is a deeply modern Victorian, which is why he is constantly being republished. He accurately perceived the worldview and mood of his day and foresaw where it would lead in the future-our today. He is a whole and wholesome person. His faith is integrated. He knows how to enjoy himself. His disposition to the body, the mind, and the heart is holistic, even Gestaltic. They all function as they should in a fully whole person, a sum which is far more than its parts. It is good psychology and sociology, much more so than a shelf-full of academic textbooks on these subjects, I know, I have a few shelves-full.

A chapter synopsis runs the risk of being absurd, but here it is:

Chapter 1: Introduction in Defence of Everything Else
His motivation statement, to produce a positive account of his personal belief.

Ch. 2: The Maniac
'Sin' not being a popular concept he proposes the tendency to madness or sanity as the test of a good philosophy. What stops us being merely happy on earth? Egotism/self-centredness a universal problem.

Ch. 3: The Suicide of Thought
Reason itself is a matter of faith. No faith leads to no thinking. The errors of (philosophical) materialism; Evolutionism (not the theory of evolution itself); nominalism (philosophical not churchmanship); moral relativism; pragmatism/utilitarianism.

Ch. 4: The Ethics of Elfland
Nature of tradition and democracy and their relationship. Myths/fairy tales and magical stories are not mere tall tales but forms of great truths. Myths capture meaning and follow an inner core of rationality despite being 'unscientific' in magical spells and items. Logic in Elfland is always logic, but in the real world scientific 'laws' are not laws, just 'weird repetitions', containing mechanism but not meaning. [Hence the need for science fiction, to put the myth back into science.] The greatest myths contain the 'Doctrine of Conditional Joy'. Eg, the apple in the garden of Eden in Genesis; Cinderella's instruction to leave the ball before midnight; and Pandora's Box. There is a pervasive meaning in all things, or meaninglessness in all things.

Ch. 5: The Flag of the World
Contra relativistic sociology/anthropology, common morality (fairness, respect for life, restraint of violence) is common to all civilised peoples of history. Being and existence is fundamentally good, not neutral, therefore we must have 'universal patriotism...a primal loyalty to life'. Humanism is a weak-willed reality-denying error. Suicide condemned as rebellion and rejection of life.

Ch. 6: The Paradoxes of Christianity
Christianity accused of wildly and almost impossibly opposite errors. Eg, Christianity is morbidly fixated on sin and damnation, but is also somehow a rose-tinted spectacles pie-in-the-sky type of religion. Or, Christianity is soppy-for gullible children and old-maidish, but also too aggressive, producing Crusaders like Richard Coeur de Leon. Is it possible to coherently compound the elements of truth in these accusations?

Ch. 7: The Eternal Revolution
Is human progress possible, and what do we mean by progress? Evolution. Marxism simplistic, bound to fail [and yea, verily, it came to pass]. Doctrine of original sin.

Ch. 8: The Romance of Orthodoxy
Miracles. Creeds. Science. Buddhism. '...to a Christian existence is a story'.

Ch. 9: Authority and the Adventurer

Trinitarianism. Free will and rationality. Jesus and the Church. Why the Roman Empire fell, why the life of Christ is the life everlasting.