Review: Orthodoxy - Chesterton

I decided to write my senior thesis on G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) during my last year of college. I quickly discovered that Chesterton was extremely prolific. In addition to being a full-time journalist, he wrote approximately 80 books, volumes of poetry, hundreds of essays, and several plays. It was overwhelming, but since I had received a copy of Orthodoxy for Christmas, I began my research there. It was the perfect place to begin, because, as I later learned, the book is critical for thoroughly understanding the rest of Chesterton’s work. All of the major themes in his fiction are explained in this short book.

I opened Orthodoxy for the first time and was soon confused. Knowing that Chesterton was Roman Catholic, I expected that a book titled "Orthodoxy" would be an overview of Roman Catholic theology. It isn't. Ironically enough, it is an unorthodox apologetic for Christianity as a whole. Orthodoxy is unorthodox in that, rather than giving arguments to defend Christianity, Chesterton defends common sense, and finds in the end that common sense itself defends Christianity.

I decided that I liked the book upon reading the first two sentences, and by the second chapter, I was chortling in my coffee. Orthodoxy begins with the words,

The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

In addition to being witty, Chesterton is an exceptional writer. Every paragraph is full of personality. Even on the rare occasion when I disagree with him (he wasn't a fan of the Reformation, but I am) I can't help but like him. All he writes is so well put that to paraphrase Chesterton is to commit a crime against his talents. This makes Orthodoxy a difficult book to pull quotes from. It's nearly impossible to pull out a single sentence; whenever I try, I end up quoting an entire paragraph or two. His writing is also notable for the way he turns the world on its head. But through Chesterton one soon finds that the world makes sense only when it is upside down. Two examples will suffice:

The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

Everyone I know who has read Orthodoxy has remarked that they were overcome with an urge to underline every sentence. This is probably because besides being remarkably insightful, Orthodoxy, like every other non-fiction book Chesterton wrote, is really a book about everything. As he once wrote elsewhere,

If Christianity should happen to be true -- that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe -- then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.