Thor's Day: Where philosophy and testimony meet poetry

A review of G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy

By Kyle Garza

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy stands at a crossroads uncommon in apologetics [the discipline of defending a position (often religious) through the systematic use of information]: it melds several forms of discourse in a way the reviewer did not think possible, for it combines cogent reasoning with testimony and—quite unexpectedly—poetry, and these are listed in this order purposefully for reasons that will soon be explained. The text is a continuation of a dialogue in the early 20th century between Chesterton and his modern philosophical opponents. Having refuted the philosophies and the philosophers of his day in his collection of essays titled Heretics, Chesterton was soon rejoined by a demand to offer an alternative philosophy to the moderns'. Orthodoxy is that offer.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874-1936

    However, the approach is what makes Chesterton’s apologetic so unique. Chesterton admits that Orthodoxy is “unavoidably autobiographical” while constantly drawing upon literary tropes to create “a set of mental pictures” that explain how he haphazardly stumbled upon the Christian Creed (the Apostles’ Creed specifically). In that sense, it is his poetry that makes his work so uniquely useful to the modern apologist, for poetry is the fine art of expression on a budget, of packing meaning into few words, of condensing so much into so little. Unlike the historical or scientific or ontological argument for Christian orthodoxy, Orthodoxy employs poetry to convey a personal testimony that illustrates a set of universal truths. The danger is thus that one can easily get lost in the metaphors, allusions, and similes and begin to wonder “What does it all mean?” As Billy Collins assessed in his “Introduction to Poetry,” all those unfamiliar with this art may just

tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Still, Chesterton does not seem to fault his reader for this; after all, he does provide the occasional summary or brief outline of what he means to say by his poetry.

But perhaps getting lost in the poetry is Chesterton’s goal. It serves as a parallel for his own testimony; like poetry, it allows the reader to experience the poem with the author. As Chesterton grew up attempting to “found a heresy of [his] own,” he thought he was trailblazing in the woods only to find that he was treading the beaten path of orthodoxy in the city. Poetry is thus the perfect medium for Orthodoxy’s expression, for Chesterton himself finds that “Christian pleasure [is] poetic” and that God himself is a playwright Who has written “not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.” The poetry is the medium because the message of Orthodoxy is in itself poetic, and God is Chesterton’s master poet archetype.
    Still, his philosophy itself is embedded in a dialogue, and Chesterton invites the reader to listen in. Orthodoxy is a response to the philosopher G.S. Street’s demand for philosophy. Thus, it has enough to do with modern philosophy that the reader may require at least a college-introductory level of modern philosophy to keep up with the conversation; familiarizing oneself with the key tenets of modernism, pragmatism, naturalism, materialism, determinism, etc. will serve one well before delving into Orthodoxy, though it is not required. It may, however, require a degree of innate interest in discussing matters of abstract nouns such as “liberty, innovation, and advance” and how orthodoxy is “the only safe guardian of morality or order.” If the reading apologist or skeptic is not fascinated and easily enveloped by an innate joy in ideas, then the text will no doubt end up bound, gagged, and tortured as Billy Collins predicted.

At every turn, Chesterton finds that his personal extrapolations mirror positions founded in Christian orthodoxy. These positions will resonate with the apologist or skeptic that has stumbled upon similar universal truths, or they may just beckon one to inquire of the validity of these notions for the first time. Among these are five assertions that Chesterton admits arose from feelings, senses, notions, fancies, and even haunting instincts: that roses are red by some sort of “divine choice” or that grass could have been any other color than green, that happiness hangs on a conditional thread, that the cosmos finds a “fulfilled significance” in being small and cozy, and that we are all somehow “the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.” If these notions do not immediately appeal to an innate sense in the reader, then perhaps his chief and founding contention will. He says it in varying ways throughout Orthodoxy, but it can be summarized best in his own words: “How can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?” It is “the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.” It is a line of reasoning that appeals to what the author hopes is a universal perception, a stone’s throw from C.S. Lewis’s appeal to universal morality in Mere Christianity.
    If this does not resonate with the reader, then herein lies what is perhaps the strongest caliber of ammunition that Chesterton offers the modern apologist: a series of arguments and metaphors that paint the “modern intelligence” as that of a madman. Like Heretics, Orthodoxy goes far in its refutation of modern philosophy. Chesterton contends that materialism has the “effect of stopping thought itself,” that evolution “does not destroy religion but rationalism,” that “the pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.” Thus, by process of elimination, Chesterton finds that he must “begin to sketch a view of life” that rejects modern philosophy due to its many inherent contradictions.
    His new sketch provides the modern apologist with a basis to reason with modern materialists, those whom Chesterton calls madmen “in the prison of one thought.” Chesterton recognizes this “one thought” as the idea that the universe is a closed system with no fixed purpose or ideals. His counteroffer is, however, a tough sell at best, for it is based on a set of five axioms that he “felt in [his] bones” since childhood. Perhaps these will resonate with some spiritual side of a man, though the reviewer finds it difficult to believe that a “madman” like a materialist could ever come to believe things seemingly so “mad” to him as the following: First, “that this world does not explain itself.” Second, that the “magic” in the world “must have a meaning” and a purpose, and that there must be “something personal in the world” behind it. Third, that the purpose is somehow “beautiful” in its design, despite its defects. Fourth, that we owe “an obedience to whatever made us.” Lastly, that all good in the universe is somehow a “remnant… of some primordial ruin.”
    Because these axioms seem impossible to offer to a liberal-minded philosopher, Chesterton bolsters his argument by demonstrating how the materialist is not as liberal-minded as he presumes himself. In this way, Chesterton’s thus far imaginative apologetic becomes most effective for the modern apologist because it begins to place the shoe on the other foot. It is not so much an argument for orthodoxy as it is an argument against materialism. It is a line of reasoning that anyone could begin in the form of a question: “How did you conclude ‘the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on’?” The answer for Chesterton is of course that the materialist’s worldview is based on axioms just as much as his own. In other words, the materialist has a “faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos.” This is no knockdown argument to be sure, but it does level the playing field in the philosophical arena.

Having turned the tables, Chesterton concludes Orthodoxy with a series of rhetorical questions for the reader to consider. Why are the enemies of the faith so willing to “[fling] away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the church”? Why do men tower with such “eccentricity” above the beasts of the world? And perhaps most poignant, referring to Jesus in the context of the Roman Empire, “What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead”? Essentially, how has Christianity survived as long as it has when by all accounts it “ought to have died...in the Ragnarok of the end of Rome”?
    He invites one to think through the issues for oneself, just as he did in his own journey towards Christianity. He demonstrates an exemplary apologetics practice in this: speak the Truth, then let the Truth speak. Hence he concludes with words that echo like the Gospel itself: “Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.”
_______________
Copyright © 2013 by Kyle Garza

Comment box is located below