Orthodoxy

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Caricature of the author

My favorite thing about this book is Chesterton’s inability to see any issue by the light of so-called common sense. He has an amazing knack for interpreting the world as if from the perspective of a child or an alien. I hope you’ll enjoy these unorthodox insights from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.

“I did try to found a heresy of my own, but when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was Orthodoxy.”

Quotes & Concepts

• Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world. They rely entirely on a simple set of maxims which are not true.
• It is possible to take certain matters too seriously to give them a serious philosophical examination.

A thing can be at once both worse and better than other things. Just as a wider scope sees both farther left and farther right a narrower one.

• Sin is the only part of Christian theology that can really be proven.
• Reason, not imagination, breeds insanity. This is because the impulse of reason is to span the infinite rather than to bask in it.
• The horrible Crusades were organized for the difficult defense of reason.
• If great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners.
• Madmen read too deeply into the conspiratorial causation of every action. If they could become careless, they would become sane.
• A figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.
• The trouble is not that they cannot see the answer. The trouble is that they cannot even see the riddle.
• Nietche denied egoism by preaching it. For to preach anything is to give it away… To preach egoism is to practice altruism.
• This is the chief assumption of materialism: things that go on repeating are probably dead. If the universe were personal, it would vary.
• The suicide insults the whole universe as containing nothing worth living for.
• The unselfish egoist is the most intolerable type. He is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion.

Man’s power of enjoyment has destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure, for the chief pleasure is surprise.

• Courage is a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
• The chief aim of the order in Christianity is to make room for good things to run wild.
• We need not worry as much about a censorship of the press as of a censorship by the press.
• Chesterton’s paramount request of utopia is to hold him to his word, to take his vows seriously: to avenge his honor on himself.
• God is a society, and it is not well for him to be alone. Out of the desert, with scimitar in hand, come the true children of the lonely god, to lay waste the world.
• Christianity is the only religion with a God who can sympathize with an atheist. For a moment on the cross, God was bereft of God.
• I accept Christianity not because it tells this or that particular truth, but because it has revealed itself to be a true-telling thing. All other philosophies say what is plainly true, but Christianity says the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true.”

Extended Notes & Observations

Insanity in Circles

All argument against plain fact is always argument in a circle. (It’s going in a circle in order to avoid going where the facts would lead it. It ends up where it began because that’s where it wants to be).

Madness may be defined as using mental activity to reach mental helplessness. This is the tendency, if not the project, of many modern thinkers, such as Schopenhauer, Shaw, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy.

Man cannot think himself out of mental evil, for it is the organ of thought that has become diseased.

Insanity, like the defense of a criminal, does offer a robust explanation of the facts. But its smaller circle doesn’t compass the truth, even though it’s a complete circle.

The sane man, the mystic, has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seem to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.

Insanity is reason in the void. Mysticism keeps men sane. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must, in the end, have softening of the brain.

Humility Misplaced

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Humility has moved from the organ of ambition to the organ of conviction, where it was ever meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself but undoubting about the truth. This has been exactly reversed… The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. The new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

The “Can’t-win” Structure

1. A man says there is a conspiracy against him.
2. All the implicated conspirators deny it.
3. That is exactly what conspirators would do, he says.

How it works in relationships:

• A man say that he likes his soup warm: not too hot but not too cold.
• Having made his own assessment the single criterion for acceptability, he can then fail you at will — in either direction. Cold will be too cold, and hot, too hot.
• If you protest his assessment, he will accuse you of disrespecting or devaluing him.
• He believes that keeping you in his debt is the best way to get what he wants.

Doubting the Doubters

Reading the great agnostics and skeptics triggered in Chesterton doubts deeper than those of the authors. He compares the criticisms of Christianity to reports of a man whom some feel is too tall, some too short, some too thin, and others too fat. One explanation would be that he was strangely shaped. Another would be that he was the right shape, and each report said more about the biases of the reporter than it said about the man himself.

Fairytales

In fairytales, an incomprehensible happiness rests on an incomprehensible condition.

Beauty and the beast: a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

Cinderella: humility will be exalted.

Rejecting the Supernatural

In rejecting the supernatural, you either deny the main principle of democracy — that people can place some degree of trust in one another — or you affirm the main principle of materialism: the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so, but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept the evidence, it is you rationalists who reject the evidence, being constrained to do so by your creed.

On Being Progressive

Progress is merely a metaphor drawn from walking along a road — very likely the wrong road… Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit a vision. Progress does mean that we are always changing the vision. One reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption of things is not only the best argument for being progressive, it is also the only argument against being conservative.”