G.K. Chesterton begins Orthodoxy (1908) with a parable about an English yachtsman who sets sail and discovers a new island in the South Seas. Anxiously (but manfully) he strides ashore, armed to the teeth, and adopts sign language as his means of communication with the natives. In the far off distance he spies a barbaric temple. Courageously he marches towards it with the intent of planting a British flag upon the edifice: except it is not an unfamiliar shrine he discovers there. To his surprise and confusion the barbaric temple turns out to be the Pavilion in Brighton. Does our yachtsman feel foolish? Most certainly he does, and Chesterton should know because he confesses that he was that yachtsman, only the truth he stumbled upon was not the Pavilion in Brighton but Christianity.
More than a century after the
publication of Orthodoxy,
Chesterton’s tale has lost none of its sting. The progressive liberals of the
Edwardian era appear to have been at war with Christian orthodoxy – here
loosely defined as adherence to the Apostles’ Creed – no less than today’s PC
brigade. Additionally, contemporary defenders of Christianity often share with
Chesterton a similar history of once having been on the other side of the
barricades. They, too, lived their formative years striving hard to find unique
and original truths in order to be “ten minutes in advance” of the latest
intellectual fashion, and
so also stand to be punished in “the fittest and funniest way”. In other words,
the mishap of Chesterton’s yachtsman is, for many of us today, a record of our
own misadventures. The yachtsman’s discovery is not untrue, because the
Pavilion in Brighton remains the Pavilion in Brighton, whichever way you look
at it. Nevertheless, just when the yachtsman – and by extension Chesterton and
all who stumble upon their spiritual inheritance later in life – fancies he
stands alone in his discovery, the realisation hits that he is “in the
ridiculous position of being backed up by all of Christendom”.
Chesterton had a famous penchant for
subverting popular sayings and proverbs. “Travel narrows the mind” remains a
personal favourite, but the list is impossibly long and over the years not a
few critics have considered Chesterton’s wit and levity to be detrimental to
his polemical gravitas. Clive
James is not alone in arguing that Chesterton’s “vice was wilful paradox”. We
can easily imagine Chesterton on television lobbing back droll one-liners to
celebrity atheist Christopher Hitchens: “If there were no God, there would be
no atheists.” Certainly there are lines in Orthodoxy that some might deem more clever than
serious, but Chesterton was a profound thinker, an aspect of the man that
really comes into its own in chapter six of Orthodoxy titled, appropriately enough, “The
Paradox of Christianity”.
Chesterton lists the charges made
against Christianity by its detractors and finds them, ultimately,
inconsistent. Christianity was a nightmare in the opinion of one and a fool’s
paradise according to someone else; too optimistic for some, and morbidly pessimistic
for others; too meek and too violent; too austere and too full of pomp; and so
on ad infinitum: “Christianity
could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask
on a black world.” Chesterton’s epiphany is that at its core Christianity
represents a paradox – a paradox, however, that makes a unifying sense of
life’s eternal contradictions. The secret of orthodox or conventional
Christianity, contends Chesterton, is that it is simultaneously worldly and
unworldly. While Paganism or Stoicism seek to balance oppositional human
emotions – for instance, modesty and pride – by amalgamating these qualities
and thus diluting or moderating their full force, Christianity allows each full
reign. People with a Christian faith believe they have a personal relationship
with the Creator of All Things, and yet know that they themselves, however
successful in human terms, are the creators of very little, let alone their own
salvation. Mastering the paradox of mortal existence, argues Chesterton,
explains “the thrilling romance” of both the history and the spirit of orthodox
Christianity.
One of the truly startling things
about reading Orthodoxy
in 2011 is encountering the same arguments against Christianity that we bump
into today (witness Dawkins, Dennet, and Harris), only marginally reconfigured
and restated in a slightly new context. Chesterton, if he were alive, would
find it just as easy to demolish their assertions as he did with those of his
own “agnostic” contemporaries. Thus, he noted that so-called free thinkers in
the Edwardian era were not free thinkers at all, and that their starting point
– “the dogma of materialism” – was always their finishing point. Chesterton
would not be surprised to hear that social justice advocates such as John
Dominic Crossman and the Jesus Seminar “discovered” in their search for the
historical Jesus that the Second Person of the Trinity was an all-too-human
social justice advocate. Their worldview, in short, happens to be a closed
system, and so the non-divinity of Jesus was decided before their investigation
commenced.
When Chesterton penned Orthodoxy, Christianity’s claims to
universality had already been under assault for more than a hundred years. In
the big picture, so the argument went, was not Christianity just a Euro-centric
rendering of a human impulse that in other parts of the world had resulted in
Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism? Chesterton will have none of it and time has
proven him right. Ask the brave Christians in Iran who daily risk everything to
live out their faith if religions are transposable. Orthodoxy also admonishes the claims of
secularists who explain Christianity’s ascendancy with moments of great
cultural and social ignorance. On the contrary, argues Chesterton, Christianity
“arose in Mediterranean civilisation in the full summer of the Roman Empire”.
When Constantine “nailed the cross to the mast” the civilised world was “swarming
with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun”. Moreover, Christianity
does not belong to the dark ages, but “was the one path across the dark ages
that was not dark”. There are many moments in Orthodoxy that are no less illuminating and
persuasive than David Bentley Hart’s masterful Atheist Delusions (2009), and one can almost forget
Chesterton was working over a hundred years ago at great speed and in the midst
of numerous other famous writing endeavours.
“Wilful paradox” might have been
Chesterton’s flaw but it was also, fittingly, his strength. If the allegorical
yachtsman’s – and Chesterton’s – blunder represents a mistake, it is a most
enviable mistake. “What could be more delightful than to have in the same few
minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the
humane security of coming home again?” The yachtsman, along with Chesterton and
everybody else who experiences a mid-life discovery of Christianity, can enjoy
going away and coming home, and
can enjoy them at the very same time. How agreeable to brace one’s self for the
most terrible possibilities imaginable and then realise with a jolt that one is
home. It is a fiasco, as Chesterton says, but at least it is a “happy fiasco”.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of The Salisbury Review
