In case the few, yet distinguished, readers of this blog haven’t noticed, over the past month or so I have been working my way through Gilbert K. Chesterton’s book(s) “Heretics / Orthodoxy.” This book was originally 2 books, one aptly named “Heretics” and the other “Orthodoxy” but has been combined into one edition.
I say that I “worked” through this volume precisely because at times I did have to toil to wrap my brain around early 20th century vocabulary and/or cultural references. I have stated previously that I felt that Chesterton was the Dr. Albert Mohler of his day, very acutely aware of the popular philosophies that were circulating and influencing the times. And like Dr. Mohler, Chesterton has a way of cutting to the heart and/or foundation of each philosophy and uncover the fatal flaws and mistakes made by their proponents. Chesterton was up against philosophies of Nietzsche, Marx, Kipling, and Shaw to name a few.
In the first part of the book Chesterton takes on specific philosophies, deconstructs them and points out their fallacies and absurdities. Each chapter is filled with intricate, sometimes paradoxical arguments as He points out that Kipling in loving the world and its civilizations became imprisoned to a superficial knowledge of it. Chesterton demolishes Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and the Nietzsche philosophy of the super-human. He lays bare the pessimistic and non-mysterious thoughts with statements like
“The man who said, ‘Blessed he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,’ put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth ‘Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.’”
A common thread that appears throughout the “Heretics” chapters is that Chesterton shows the reader that the philosophies of the day are little more than an idealism (and often a pessimistic idealism at that) that is not based on any sense of reality. This idealism leaves no room for mystery, takes the wonder out of life and creation and confuses morality. But what I truly found amazing was that the idealism of the early 1900’s is quite similar to the idealism of the early 2000’s. The world is so busy knowing everything that it truly knows nothing. The world is so idealistically bent toward inclusive intellectualism that it removes itself from any real moral foundation. I think that the scary difference between the early 1900s and the present is Chesterton was fighting this faulty philosophy primarily with admitted atheists and agnostics while we are battling this faulty philosophy with people who claim to be Christians.
The second part of the book, Orthodoxy, was written as a response to his critics who claimed that he attacked others philosophies without defining his own philosophy. This is basically a philosophical auto-biography of how Chesterton went from being an agnostic to believing in Christianity. In the opening chapter he defines himself as:
“the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before…I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths…but I have discovered not that they weren’t truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.”
The following chapters offer a keen insight into the thought process that God used to bring Chesterton to Christ. Of these chapters the one entitled “The Suicide of Thought” really stood out. In this chapter Chesterton demonstrates the good and the inherent danger of the strict intellectual and/or skeptic that questions divine authority.
“The peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself….It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?” “The young skeptic says, ‘I have a right to think for myself.’ But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, ‘I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.’” And so Chesterton realizes that there must be some truth that is beyond human thought and comprehension. There must be a foundation, a standard by which mankind can reason, a standard that is fixed and yet in some ways mysterious. An intellectual and/or skeptic thinks himself brilliant for asking questions, yet Chesterton responds “We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.”
If you only have time in your life to read one chapter of this book…read “The Suicide of Thought.”
Due to its philosophical nature this book is great for world-view issues, but is not meant to be a book on apologetics. The reader will need to have a dictionary nearby and wouldn’t hurt to have a set of encyclopedias to look up vague cultural references. However the reward for reading this book is great. It stretches the mind and forces one to put his philosophical beliefs through the ringer. There are hundreds of quotes that I would love to include but I will close with this quote – a quote that summarizes the heart of the Christian experience, and the ultimate end of Chesterton’s journey to orthodoxy: “Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.”






