Orthodoxy

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: an entertaining read, even when you violently disagree
Review: Chesterton was a gleefully confessed madman and a genius with language, but he's also very "Johnsonian" in his own way--and by that I mean that much like dear Dr. Johnson he says everything so well ... that sometimes you're so delighted by the prosity that you don't consider the message. I'm less blinded by the textual pyrotechnics than I once was, and I'm less wholeheartedly dazzled by the philosophy than I once found myself ... but it's still an interesting read and it still makes some remarkable so-obvious-you-never-noticed-it observations about life, the universe and everything.

The best thing you can say about Chesterton is that you don't have to agree with him to enjoy reading him.

Rating:
Summary: Wordy, but well worth a read
Review: "Orthodoxy" is described by Chesterton as "a slovenly autobiography", a description that's really not too far off the mark. Instead of depending upon rigorous logic, the contents of this work are rather "mental pictures" of a sort, which is what the author states at the outset. This sort of approach is easy to attack by any contrarian skeptic, but I can't criticize Chesterton, as he and I are really cut from the same cloth. Loath to state the obvious, we both prefer to *illustrate* the truth via induction. This is a perfectly valid method of presenting ideas, it's just that it's easy to misunderstand and misrepresent. It's for this reason that this book probably wouldn't change someone's mind-kind of a litmus test for the open-minded, which, it turns out, self-proclaimed 'skeptics' or 'freethinkers' are anything but.

Chesterton makes two really good points throughout the book: 1) sanity lies in maintaining seemingly opposed extremes in a kind of dramatic tension. It's not balance, it's both at once. It's not a contradiction, it's a paradox. Christianity fits this like nothing else: singularity/plurality, freedom/servanthood, individuality/assimilation, etc., all are fused together in seeming contradiction of common sense. But don't we always find truth to be stranger than fiction? In contrast, monomania is a kind of insanity, like total belief in oneself, or the belief that one unfalsifiable human construct, like evolution, completely illuminates everything. 2) The importance of maintaining a kind of humble childlike wonder about the world, the universe, about existence itself. What if you saw a four-inch-long fully-functional helicopter hovering about? Wouldn't that be delightfully incredible? Not too long ago, after reading this book, it dawned on me, upon observing a dragonfly, that that was precisely what I was looking at. I'm not even talking about creationism, irreducible complexity, any of that. It is in fact, neither here nor there. Just the fact that such a marvelous thing should exist, by any means, is truly stupendous. It should inspire deeper thought about fundamental issues. The modern-day 'scientific' priesthood is perpetually at pains to systematically dismantle the ability to see things this way even as they proclaim it superficially.

The funny thing about Chesterton's writing is that he gets so wrapped up in his ideas that rather strange-sounding, apparent non-sequiturs come up every so often. A sample Chestertonism: "As a fact, anthropophagy [cannibalism] is certainly a decadent thing, not a primitive one. It is much more likely that modern men will eat human flesh out of affectation, than that primitive man ate it out of ignorance." Well, duh!? As in his Father Brown mysteries, Chesterton loves to toss off sweeping statements, and is a bit too shy of explicating his ideas with the utmost clarity sometimes; chalk it up to slovenliness, I guess.But for the most part his ideas are sound and his writing thought-provoking.

Rating:
Summary: C.S. who?
Review: A great book even for its literary excellence alone. I've never read anyone which such a mastery of words. I don't understand why his guy isn't required reading in schools.
CS's Lewis' Mere Christianity is probably the most popular book on Christianity, outside the Bible, in the US. Perhaps because it can be read by little children. But before Mere Christianity, there was Orthodoxy and I would recommend it over Mere Christianity anyday.

Rating:
Summary: an entertaining read, even when you violently disagree
Review: Chesterton was a gleefully confessed madman and a genius with language, but he's also very "Johnsonian" in his own way--and by that I mean that much like dear Dr. Johnson he says everything so well ... that sometimes you're so delighted by the prosity that you don't consider the message. I'm less blinded by the textual pyrotechnics than I once was, and I'm less wholeheartedly dazzled by the philosophy than I once found myself ... but it's still an interesting read and it still makes some remarkable so-obvious-you-never-noticed-it observations about life, the universe and everything.

The best thing you can say about Chesterton is that you don't have to agree with him to enjoy reading him.

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 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: If You Read One Book of Apologetics, Make It This One
Review: GK has a way of bringing up ideas that seem revolutionary at first blush, but upon explanation wind up being obvious. Indeed, in his introduction, he describes his own spiritual journey that way: he likens himself to a British explorer setting sail in his yacht who winds up discovering England. He begins by explaining the limitations of reason, pointing out that men go mad not by losing their reason, but by losing everything except their reason. GK says poets seek to get their heads into the heavens, but rationalists seek to get heaven into their heads. This latter process can (not must) lead to madness. Next, GK considers the leading philosophies of his day-pragmatism, determinism, and Nietzche's theory of Will-in light of this excessive rationalism. He sums up neatly: "A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt -- the Divine Reason." On the ensuing pages GK shows how Christianity alone provides the key for how one is to live. A few aspects of his arguments struck me as exceptional. His arguments are eminently reasonable, not mystical appeals to faith. His arguments consider the whole of man, from the broadest possible historical, psychological, and political perspectives. His arguments are balanced: he is unafraid to point out the weaknesses of his position and the strengths of another. Finally, his arguments are imbued with a gentility, humility and lightheartedness that are sorely lacking in our public debate. It is a rare thing to be persuasive on questions of religious belief and morality; GK not only manages to pull it off, he provides a few chuckles in the bargain.