׳1925
At the portal of the modern world stood a young defender of the faith, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. As the twentieth century { 42 } began, it was becoming fashionable to question the traditional Christian faith that had held the Western world in its grip. Marx and Darwin had sown their seeds and now skepticism was growing. In England literary lions like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells advanced the notion that Christianity belonged to a darker age. The new world of the twentieth century would certainly feast on more intelligent fare.
Chesterton started out as an illustrator but soon he blossomed as a writer. G. K. became known as a novelist, but also as a literary critic and social commentator. Orthodoxy was conceived in 1903, when a man named Robert Blatchford published an attack on belief in God. Chesterton fired off a few essays in response but also began gathering thoughts for a fuller reply. It came to birth in 1908 as a series of magazine articles but was not published in book form until 1925.
The book begins with the plot of an unwritten novel: A man sails from England, hoping to explore the South Seas; but he gets turned around and ends up back in England, thinking these are South Sea Islands. "I am that man,״ says Chesterton, explaining the kind of faith he was looking for, the faith he found in Christianity, which was there all along.
He wanted something that captured the paradoxes of the human race. Christianity, he found, did this like no other philosophy or religion. (״Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.״)
He wanted joy, and he found it in the carpenter of Nazareth. ("Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.")
He wanted something magical and poetic, unlike the grim naturalism that was taking over the world. See how easily he makes his case for faith: "I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself.... The thing is magic, tme or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have someone to mean it. . . . Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design----Fourth, that the proper
form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint... . We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us." He takes this journey in half a page.
Chesterton's whimsical style is matched only by his biting wit. (These combine to make him one of the most quotable writers in history.) He regularly cut to the core of his opponents' arguments and exposed their inconsistencies. Sometimes he set critics against each other—indeed, the church was getting blasted from all sides. He offers the example of a man some say is too tall; others say too short; some say too fat; others say too lean. Maybe the man is a very odd shape, Chesterton deduces— but "he might be the right shape." And thus the criticisms say more about the critics.
Several generations of Christians have been emboldened by Chesterton's wisdom, among them C. S. Lewis, who borrowed some of his best arguments from Orthodoxy or a later Chesterton classic, The Everlasting Man.
Sure, some readers might say that Chesterton twisted logic to suit his purposes and he got away with it because he wrote in a personal, autobiographical style. When he couldn't nail down a point in an objective way, he just said, "I came to feel this way." But isn't that one of the paradoxes of Christianity? It can be argued rationally but it still comes down to personal testimony. And Chesterton still provided something that was desperately needed: an account of an intelligent man trusting Christ.
At a time when Christian faith was undergoing serious attacks, Chesterton countered not only with logic but also with levity. ("Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.") That's something we should learn today.