Orthodoxy

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 skepticism 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 center.

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.

Orthodoxy is free at Project Gutenberg in a well-proofed text. Our edition is a clean typesetting of the same public-domain text, with the chapter structure restored to a readable page.

This edition reproduces Chesterton's 1908 text as it stands. Nothing has been modernised, abridged or rephrased: the punctuation and the long sentences are his, and so is the spelling — we have kept his period forms, the æ ligature in mediæval and æsthetic, pretence, revolutionise, organising. Six plain typos carried over from the Project Gutenberg transcription have been corrected, each one a word the book itself spells correctly elsewhere.

What has been done is typesetting. The Project Gutenberg transcription is a plain-text file with hard line breaks and a dotted contents table; this edition reflows it into paragraphs, indents them rather than spacing them, gives every chapter a stable anchor so a passage can be linked to, and builds navigation that reaches each of the nine chapters directly.

The paragraph breaks are ours, and we should say so. The transcription runs to a median paragraph of 243 words and in one place 857, which is punishing on a screen; we have broken those at sentences Chesterton had already ended, bringing the median to 69. Not one word is added, removed or reordered — the sequence is identical to the transcription, character for character — but where a paragraph begins is now sometimes our judgement rather than his printer's.

The free source is linked on this book's page at tsbakerbooks.com. If all you want is Chesterton's words, take it — it is the same text. What you are paying for here is the setting.