ORTHODOXY
G.K. Chesterton
New York: Doubleday, 1973
160 pp., $4.50
We are told that when G.K. Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism, the bishops in England celebrated by opening bottles of champagne. For decades Chesterton had been brilliantly agitating for Christianity. Nine years before his conversion he had written Orthodoxy, which was a Catholic apologia even though the still-Anglican Chesterton didn't know it. But ultimately Chesterton followed his writings to the logical conclusion--he entered the ranks of the Catholic Church.
Born on May 29, 1874, in Kensington, a suburb of London, Chesterton was raised as a Unitarian by parents who were theologically and politically liberal. He found his church's answers to life's questions inadequate, however, and by the time he entered St. Paul's School he was an agnostic. From his early years Chesterton developed an interest in writing and debating, and when he graduated he took up free-lance journalism.
In 1901 Chesterton married Frances Blogg. The couple moved to Battersea, where Chesterton began to write voluminously. He wrote a spate of novels, literary studies of Robert Browning and Charles Dickens, a famous set of detective stories called the Father Brown series, a play written at the urging of Chesterton's friend and debating partner, George Bernard Shaw, and even some heroic verse and ballads.
Dynamic orthodoxy
Heretics and Orthodoxy, Chesterton's two most famous works, were published in 1905 and 1908. By this time Chesterton was clearly uncomfortable with agnosticism and had moved into a more mature Christianity than the ecclesiastical tidbits on which he had been raised. His Christian beliefs were crystallized in powerful intellectual opposition to leading liberal thinkers of his day: Shaw, H.G. Wells, Henrik Obsen, and others.
Orthodoxy is basically a book about romance, the romance of Christian orthodoxy. Chesterton's arguments are so surprising, his prose so clear and fresh, that reading the book is like riding a roller coaster for the first time as a youngster: All traditional categories are delightfully turned around, the world is made topsy-turvy, and the reader loves it.
The book is relevant today because Chesterton argues precisely for the "dynamic orthodoxy" to which Pope John Paul II calls Catholics, and indeed all people. For Chesterton, as for the pope, orthodoxy is not something outdated and dull, but something timely and exciting, moral adrenaline to inject in the veins, giving richness and purpose to life.
Chesterton begins by setting before himself the task of defending his Christian beliefs. "I will not call it my philosophy," he says, "for I did not make it. God and humanity made it, and it made me." Immediately this most personal of texts moves from the subjective into the objective. Chesterton is not merely telling us what he feels, what his perspective happens to be. He is defining that nature of feeling itself, which is part of the nature of
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