Orthodoxy

“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.”

Chesterton compares the impact of the arts on an individual’s mindset with that of the “saner” pursuits of math or technical sciences. Chesterton is convinced that it is more rational pursuits that will eventually drive an individual “insane” due to the fact that any rational attempt to totally understand the universe is simply impossible. Poetry and the arts, however, are intrinsically open to the transcendent and the infinite and are therefore much more suitable avenues for looking into the deeper questions about life.

“Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid.”

The existence of unfettered liberality of thought is a myth for Chesterton. Every system of thought has its own dogmas, brand of censorship, and way of dealing with blasphemy. Religions and scientific systems are comparable in this way: For particular scientific or philosophic viewpoints, some ideas are simply disregarded from the beginning. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, says Chesterton; he just believes that people must be honest about their own preconceived notions of what is and is not allowed to be thought or said.

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

The Christian idea of virtue necessitates that they operate in unity with each other; they are all parts of a whole. From this perspective, it does not make sense to speak about someone who is courageous but filled with pride or someone who is humble yet prone to uncontrollable fits of anger. The modern world, says Chesterton, is always attempting to exalt and seek out particular virtues at the expense of others. Without a holistic vision of how all virtues are meant to work together, they eventually become caricatures of themselves and end up as vices.

“A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. […] [T]he new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn.”

Due to the influence of thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and many others, skepticism is a popular and influential mode of engaging with the world. The problem, however, is not with the act of being skeptical but with the object over which one is skeptical. Chesterton holds that human beings have always been skeptics but that they were skeptical about themselves in the past. Now, however, there is inherent doubt or mistrust in everything; without confidence even in one’s own power of thought and rationality, human beings are increasingly unable to commit to any particular belief.

“Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.”

Too often, Chesterton notes, there is a false contrast between choice and limitation. People think, when presented with an opportunity to choose, that they are being forced to choose between freedom and oppression. This is not the case—every decision to choose one thing is a willful decision to not choose another. This is a basic truth that needs to be recognized and embraced.

“Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.”

Along with the modern inability to believe in some objective truth is the inability to see the existence of a standard. Chesterton uses the example of satire—the act of setting up a thing with humor and irony in order to criticize it—as that which actually speaks to a universal standard. A thing cannot be criticized if there is no standard against which it can be measured.

“It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record.”

When holding up democracy as a positive pursuit, Chesterton argues that it can only truly be a democracy when it includes all people, regardless of whether or not they are alive. This is what he understands as the meaning of the word “tradition”—taking seriously the voices and opinions of the people who happened to live before us. Focusing purely on what a particular generation of people think or want is far too narrow a view in Chesterton’s opinion.

“That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not ‘appreciate Nature,’ because they said that Nature was divine.”

The idea that ancient civilizations failed to appreciate the truth and beauty of the natural world is a prejudiced assumption based on a materialistic view that the world is only what it appears on the surface to be. Ancient cultures’ perception of nature as containing some spiritual reality is dismissed by some as superstition and therefore a failure to appreciate reality; however, it can also be seen as a way of seeing the truth beneath the surface—of appreciating hidden depths. Chesterton’s position is the latter, and he sees the former criticism as shallow and misguided.

“I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a storyteller.”

Chesterton’s narrative style and penchant for descriptive imagery and metaphors is illustrated here with the appeal to history as an actual story, authored by God and lived out by people who inhabit the world. From Chesterton’s point of view, history is the lived experience of human beings within the plan of divine providence. The mystery lies in the interplay between divine providence and human freedom, both of which Christian teaching affirms without attempting to resolve the apparent paradox of their coexistence.

“A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. […] To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.”

All people have loyalties, even if it is simply to live through their choice to continue existing. Nobody asks to be born, but people exist, implying a naturally developed dedication to living in this world. In Chesterton’s time spent on the virtues of patriotism and the love of a thing, he speaks about the kind of loyalty that allows one to simultaneously love and be bound to a thing, place, or person and yet—due to that same love—wish for it to be changed for the better.

“Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”

The binding nature of love is actually, says Chesterton, what allows it to truly flourish in a special kind of transparency. It allows the individuals in a relationship to be open and honest. The permanence of love allows one to truly see the other for who they truly are, in all of their imperfect reality, rather than hold back out of fear of rejection or abandonment.

“The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness.”

The Christian teaching on death is another paradox. It is a curse, as is clear from the Book of Genesis, and yet it is also the prerequisite for the attainment of eternal union with God. The mystery is that such a tragic event like death could ever lead to the greatest mode of existence possible for the human creature: eternal life in heaven.

“It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the newborn child) was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world.”

Christian teaching differs quite radically from many other ancient conceptions of God and creation (as well as many modern conceptions). Christian orthodoxy may preach the existence of an omnipresent God, but it does not preach pantheism, which conflates God and the wider universe. Chesterton disputes pantheist beliefs by saying that God and the natural world he has created are not one and the same; they are as connected yet distinct as a mother and child.

“At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.”

Discovering the basic tenets of Christianity is like discovering the basic contours of a figure or identifying the boundaries of a person’s silhouette. From one side, the shape of Christianity may seem wrong, or it may appear entirely shapeless, lacking any defined truths. Modern dispositions, however, could be approaching Christianity from an incorrect starting point, focusing on all of the wrong things and thus misinterpreting the genuine structure of the religion.

“In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. Insofar as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. Insofar as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.”

Here, Chesterton makes the distinction between a person as a member of a species and a person as an individual. As a member of humanity, a person is considered to be the height of creation; no other creature in the animal kingdom is as intellectually elevated and capable as a human. As an individual, however, a person is expected to consider themselves as lowly among all other people, to refuse to elevate themselves above any others on account of their own sinfulness.

“To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.”

Chesterton compares, through the metaphor of falling, the difference between remaining within the bounds of historical Christian orthodoxy and straying outside them. The common misunderstanding is that orthodoxy is something easy and simple, made because it is the path of least resistance, but this is far from the reality. As with the difference between standing and falling, standing requires effort and intention; falling can be done in an almost infinite number of ways and is made even easier thanks to gravity. For Chesterton, orthodoxy is like standing: It requires effort.

“Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human or divine theory), there is no principle in nature.”

While the Catholic Church holds to a tradition of ethics as natural law—the idea that there are certain ethical ideals that all human beings can agree upon regardless of religion or circumstance—it does not mean that nature innately reflects human constructs or desires. The natural world operates without meaning or intention; humans only see the cultural or religious ideas they ascribe to it.

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision.”

Chesterton here disputes the notion of continual progress, as well as the notion that progress is a universally agreed-upon phenomenon. True progress is not changing and making some manner of progress toward an as-yet-unrealized goal; instead, genuine progress, as he points out, is the constant adherence to a single, crystallized ideal and continually attempting to refashion the world according to it. It is the world that needs to be changed to be more in line with the truth, he says, rather than that truth needs to adapt to the changing times.

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.”

In a typical move for his style, Chesterton takes a popular phrase and shows how it expresses a truth while, at the same time, obscuring the reality of the idea. People commonly speak of “mother nature” to bring out the idea that all creatures are dependent on the natural world to some extent. Chesterton does not deny this, but he takes issue with a stricter view of nature as a mother. He sees the natural world and human beings as all being derived from the same source, hence his words about having the same father: God. In this way, nature is to be respected and cared for without being worshipped or unthinkingly imitated.

“If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this—that the man should rule who does not think that he can rule.”

In this proposal, Chesterton aligns with many historical philosophers, including the ancient political thinkers Plato and Aristotle, for example. While a proponent of democracy in some sense, Chesterton does point out that it makes it easy for those who least deserve to have power to attain it. While Christianity and politics have had a complex relationship, Christianity tends to promote the idea that those who do not wish to rule will in fact make the best rulers because they will be the least likely to abuse their powers or use their office for the sake of their own benefit.

“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.”

Discussing people who call themselves Christians and yet doubt or deny the very thing that Christianity requires—that Christ died and rose from the dead—Chesterton comments on how it is not their faith that makes this possible but the doubter’s commitment to a contemporary philosophical position. A commitment to physical materialism is what limits one’s ability to believe in something so inherently spiritual since materialism denies the existence of any spiritual reality, which the resurrection would require.

“If souls are separate, love is possible. If souls are united, love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself.”

Chesterton here plays with the analogous use of the language of love. A person can love themselves, as Christianity demands that people should love each other as much as they love their own self. However, self-love and love of another are strictly different concepts. This is in part Chesterton’s argument against pantheism since if all things are God, then there is no distinction between God and creature. If there is a genuine separation between the two, then there can be a real and loving relationship between them.

“History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall.”

Going back to his previous understanding about the myth of progress, Chesterton points out that the shared understanding of prehistory by most cultures is the opposite of continual progress. Far from human ascendency from a dark and muddled past, most cultures and religions begin human history with a golden age or a time of perfect peace and harmony (as with the story of paradise and creation in Judaism and Christianity), from which people are destined to descend.