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Title: Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton, Ignatius Pr ISBN: 0-89870-552-5 Publisher: Ignatius Press Pub. Date: July, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.55 (49 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Curious, Brilliant Apologetics
Comment: Orthodoxy is not the book I thought it would be. I really expected a rigorous, systematic defence of orthodox doctrine. Instead, I read a rousing autobiography, which left me in continued awe of the author, but rather bemused about Chesterton's mental habits.
First off, Chesterton in relation to various heresies (in particular secularism), is a bit like a drunken man with a sledgehammer in a china shop. Not an angry drunk, but a happy, wild-eyed, well-practiced drunk. Chesterton's intellect so thoroughly overpowers the counterarguments that he sometimes seems at a loss as to which direction to swing the hammer. So he muddles cheerfully along, smashing a bit of Nietzchism here, crushing a Socialist argument there. And through it all he seems painfully aware of the oncoming post-modern society, in which the ultimate secular virtue of tolerance would leave us oblivious to rational argument.
Orthodoxy is replete with classic Chesterton. He makes his points with precise metaphors that waste no words. A particular favorite of mine is his argument against the relativist effort to remove value from physical or abstract objects. Chesterton cites the title of a work called "the Love of Triangles" and points out that if Triangles are loved for anything, they are loved for being triangular.
As with The Everlasting Man, Chesterton provides his readers with a neat intellectual trick that can be used for self-analysis. In Orthodoxy, the trick is the reduction of conversation to monosyllabic sentences. Chesterton has found another key characteristic of the modern world here - the tendency of people to adopt a complex language for the express intent of not saying anything at all. Anyone familiar with the sciences will understand the necessity of precision in language, combined with the maddening inability of the words themselves to convey the desired meaning. As an example, I refer to isotactic, syndiotactic, and atactic polymers. These terms refer to the pattern of orientation in polymer chains. Is it possible to infer that from the terminology? Our language is full of adopted "scientific" nomenclature that contains meaning of which we are unaware. One of these days, I'm going to state a hyperthesis and wait for someone to point out my spelling error.
But I digress. Chesterton's recognition is that the more complex our language, and the more specialized its application, the less meaning the language itself conveys. Witness the confusion over the terms "liberal" and "progressive," cited by Chesterton as examples. Anyone familiar with the modern (American" connotations of these words will recognize that "liberal" is someone who wants to limit free speech, have government control over the economy, mandate the membership of the Boy Scouts, and dictate how many gallons of water can be contained in your toilet tank. Progressive is simply someone who wants to progress back to the 60's. The meanings of the words are a far cry from the definition of the words.
Chesterton supplies the antidote - one syllable words only. While this is obviously of limited utility, it's a nice exercise (like trying to cook breakfast using only your left hand, if you're right handed). His point is well taken - the one-syllable words are pretty hard to confuse or confute, and they're remarkably handy. They're also anathema to wordy people like me.
I cannot, of course, help compare Chesterton's autobiographical Orthodoxy with Augustine's Confessions. I shudder to think that it is the different audiences that define the difference in these books, but in any case here is a contrast between a brilliant ancient writer and a brilliant modern writer, both explaining how they came to accept Christ and His Church. Where Augustine is expansive, structured, precise and deeply interested in addressing each of the many ways we might consider the phenomenon of "memory," Chesterton is rambling, concise, and chaotic in his visualization of madness and genius.
Finally (yes! Finally!) I have to admit that I remain unconvinced of Chesterton's hyperthesis of sanity. Where Chesterton sees sanity as the result of a tension between two extremes (in fact, two poles), I suspect that it is such tension that generally "cracks" people's heads (in most cases the tension between perceived reality and reality-by-policy).
Chesterton, however, will get the better of me with such arguments as: "To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything is a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
Magnificent!
Rating: 5
Summary: Entertaining, humorous, intelligent, and full of surprises
Comment: Portly, fun loving, witty G.K. Chesterton decided to write this book as a companion volume to his book HERETICS. Since HERETICS had criticised contemporary philosophies, ORTHODOXY was written to present an alternative viewpoint, and is therefore both affirmative in tone and autobiographical in many places. A sampling of his chapter titles gives some idea of Chesterton's sense of fun as well as his unusual approach to the matter of Christianity. Chapter one is "In Defense of Everything Else" (one pictures Chesterton with a whimsical, impish smile on his face as he wrote this). There are also chapters on "The Suicide of Thought", "The Ethics of Elfland" (a really superb chapter), "The Maniac", and "The Paradoxes of Christianity". In this easily readable book (only 160 pages in the small paperback edition), Chesterton shows that theological reflections and philosophical ruminations need be neither boring nor incomprehensible. This was jolly good fun to read, being both funny and intellectually stimulating. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: A detective's romance
Comment: Before his series of Father Brown mysteries, G.K. Chesterton wrote "Orthodoxy," an autobiographical 'detective' story of how he came to believe the Christian faith. Drawing from "the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy...an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church," Mr. Chesterton playfully and inductively reasons his way toward the one worldview that best explains and preserves the phenomena in the world he found around himself.
The world around Mr. Chesterton was rife with Modernism in the early twentieth century. Based on philosophies of the late nineteenth century, religious and political traditions were being questioned. Anarchism, communism, and socialism were the parlor topics of the day; the merely symbolic importance of religion was being settled upon. These are the roots of our post-modern society today in which the meaning of nearly everything (even words, according to literary deconstructionists) is now in doubt. At one point in the chapter entitled "The Suicide of Thought," Mr. Chesterton quips, "We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." An exaggeration even today, undoubtedly. Still, we have traveled quite a distance philosophically since the era before the World Wars, and "Orthodoxy" is an excellent snapshot of where we've come from.
But be warned: This snapshot captures a lot of active thought. It took me a couple of reads over as many years to get a handle on the structure of the book, and now the rest of it has been becoming clearer to me. Part of the problem is Mr. Chesterton's writing style. There is much playfulness in his language, and a reader could mistakenly conclude that the author's reasoning relies heavily upon wordplay, the turn of a phrase to turn the tables on his opponents. It can become frustrating if one isn't careful. Mr. Chesterton himself acknowledges this impression, "Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise the most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused." But don't miss the meat for the gravy (or the salad for the dressing, as your case may be). The potency of his arguments doesn't rely on his clever semantics but on his connections between observed facts and the ancient, corresponding orthodoxy of Christianity. Mr. Chesterton has fun with words because he can, not because he needs to.
This mixture of cleverness and careful thinking ultimately leads Mr. Chesterton to this conclusion: Christian faith is well-reasoned trust in Christ. And the desire for well-reasoned trust is a "practical romance," as Mr. Chesterton calls it--a need in the ordinary person for "the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure...an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." A way to accept the knowable while looking beyond it toward what is yet to be known.
Mr. Chesterton wrote "Orthodoxy" for people looking for that kind of romance. "If anyone is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book." However, this book isn't for everyone. "If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing." The inconvincible cannot be convinced. Yet the skeptical (such as Mr. Chesterton once was) can be because they are the doubters who're still looking around. I myself come from a skeptic's background and regard "Orthodoxy" as a plausible, if sometimes difficult to comprehend, and wonderful way someone can come to trust the claims of Christianity.
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Title: The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton ISBN: 0898704448 Publisher: Ignatius Press Pub. Date: April, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: What's Wrong With the World by G. K. Chesterton ISBN: 0898704898 Publisher: Ignatius Press Pub. Date: October, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox by G.K. CHESTERTON ISBN: 0385090021 Publisher: Image Books Pub. Date: 15 January, 1974 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Heretics by G. K. Chesterton ISBN: 1842329898 Publisher: House of Stratus Inc. Pub. Date: 01 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.99 |
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Title: The Man Who Was Thursday (20Th-Century Classics) by G. K. Chesterton, Kingsley Amis ISBN: 0140183884 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: August, 1990 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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