Orthodoxy

Chesterton is known, perhaps more than any other author of the last two centuries, as an author who employs and delights in paradox. While this is likely thanks to his own style and rhetorical proclivities, it is at least equally due to the fact that Christianity itself is a religion of paradoxes. Chesterton continually points this fact out and uses it to great effect in countless circumstances. The very first paradox he employs is the image of the cross in Chapter 2 when he compares the religions of Buddhism and Christianity. Speaking of the respective symbols of the two religions—the circle for Buddhism and the cross for Christianity—he sees the cross as an image that embodies paradox since it is two lines that intersect at perpendicular angles.

Since the cross is such a shape, it is intrinsically universal: “The cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. […] The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers” (42). Since the very symbol of Christianity is itself paradoxical, Chesterton views the presence of paradox within the faith as completely expected and reasonable.