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Orthodoxy
1908 · 190 pages
Orthodoxy
by G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton's account of how he arrived at orthodox Christianity by trying to think his way out of it. He describes himself as an explorer who set sail to discover a new land and landed, absurdly, on England — the man who worked out his own private philosophy only to find it was the creed of the church. Written in 1908 as the answer to critics who told him to say what he actually believed, it is the most enjoyable book of apologetics in English.
The convert behind the argument
Chesterton was raised in a liberal, Unitarian-leaning household, drifted through scepticism, and passed through a period of real darkness in his art-school years that included a flirtation with the occult and something close to despair. Orthodoxy is his account of the route out — not an argument imposed on him, but a set of conclusions he reached separately and then found waiting for him in the creed. He was received into the Catholic Church much later, in 1922.
Summary
Chesterton opens by saying the only excuse for the book is that it is an answer to a challenge: he had been told, after Heretics, that he was happy to attack everyone else's philosophy without stating his own. Orthodoxy is the statement, and he warns at the start that it will be an account of how he came to believe rather than a proof that anyone else should.
The central chapters work by inversion. 'The Maniac' argues that the madman is not the man who has lost his reason but the man who has lost everything except his reason. 'The Suicide of Thought' traces how modern scepticism ends by destroying the tools of thought itself. 'The Ethics of Elfland' finds in fairy tales a truer account of the world's contingency than the scientific fatalism of his contemporaries. 'The Paradoxes of Christianity' catalogues the mutually contradictory charges laid against the faith — too pessimistic and too optimistic, too meek and too warlike, too plain and too gaudy — and suggests that a thing attacked from every side at once may simply be standing in the centre.
The book's governing image is of the yachtsman who miscalculates and discovers England under the impression it is a new island — the comic figure Chesterton says he was himself, having built his own philosophy from scratch and found it was, in every particular, Christian orthodoxy. It has never been out of print since 1908.
Who was G.K. Chesterton?
G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English journalist, critic, poet and novelist, educated at St Paul's and the Slade School of Art, where he passed through the period of pessimism and near-solipsism he describes obliquely in this book. He was raised in a household of liberal, broadly Unitarian sympathies rather than any settled orthodoxy.
He became the most prolific and most quoted journalist of his generation, wrote the Father Brown stories, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1922 — fourteen years after Orthodoxy, which he wrote as an Anglican. He described the book's argument as the one that had already been settled in him long before that formal step.
Common questions
- What is Chesterton's Orthodoxy about?
- It is Chesterton's account of how he came to Christian belief by attempting to construct his own philosophy and discovering that what he had built was orthodox Christianity. He calls himself the explorer who set out to find a new land and arrived, ridiculously, back in England.
- Should I read Orthodoxy or The Everlasting Man first?
- Orthodoxy is the personal one — how he got there — and is shorter and funnier. The Everlasting Man is the historical argument about Christ and the church's place in human history, and it is the book C.S. Lewis credited with unsettling his own atheism. Most readers start with Orthodoxy.
- Was Chesterton a convert?
- Yes. He was raised in a liberal, Unitarian-leaning family and passed through scepticism and a period of pessimism in his youth. He wrote Orthodoxy in 1908 as an Anglican and was received into the Catholic Church in 1922.
A note on the text. Orthodoxy is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
Related reading
Also by Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
G.K. Chesterton · 1925
The historical argument to this book's personal one — and the book C.S. Lewis credited with breaking down his atheism.