A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Orthodoxy Revisited

By: R.J. Moeller

I understand that fine people like yourselves lead busy lives and don't have the time to read as much as they would like.  But I also understand that people like yourself do not read as much as they could (and definitely not as much as they should).  What I would like to do, starting today, is help narrow the field in your mind about which books and authors are more worthy of your precious time than others.

The most famous book by my favorite author is Orthodoxy.  It was written exactly 100 years ago, in England, and yet after working your way through the chapters that I will be re-publishing on my website over the next eight weeks, you'll see that it might have been written last week.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Kensington, England in 1874.  He was raised by two loving parents who were in the real estate business, and had a younger brother (Cecil) who was his best friend and fiercest critic.  In 1901 he met and married Francis Blogg to whom he remained lovingly devoted until the day of his death in 1936.  Physically, he was a massive man (6'3'', 300 lbs).  Intellectually, he was a massive force.

GKC was a prolific writer, popular debater, and insightful social commentator.  His ability to acutely analyze the passing scene was something akin to Mozart's ability to compose heavenly music.  He stood for and defended everything I hold most dear: Christianity, the family, good food, close friends, and the de-centralization of power in the hands of fallen men.

I don't want to write a love poem to the guy, but I really like Chesterton.  I mean really like.  There is no author who has spoken to me in quite the way he has.  I feel a connection to him, and hope you will as well.

G.K. Chesterton is a name that many have heard, and even more have never read.  My goal is to change that.

When I first started reading GKC, the biggest obstacle to mining the depths of his wisdom was the steady stream of early 20th century British references he would make to drive home his points.  I had no idea who Jospeh McCabe was, or what Hanwell might be, or where Brighton was located.  However, when I took the time to investigate what I was reading, a whole new world opened up to me and I became the Chesterton devotee I am today.

And that's what I'm proposing to do for you.  I will be your middle-man on the path to reaching Chesterton nirvana.  Because Orthodoxy is public domain, I am legally able to provide you with a slightly adapted version of the most important book (outside of The Good Book) in my life.

Below are the preface and first chapter of Orthodoxy.  Read them.  Give GKC a try.  I won't be sending links to the proceeding chapters out, but you will be able to find a new one each week here at A Voice in the Wilderness for the next eight.

Please do enjoy and please do send me any questions or feedback you have.

PREFACE

This book is meant to be a companion to Heretics, and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called Heretics because it merely criticized current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. I have been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which stressed Cardinal John Henry Newman in writing his Apologia; I’ve been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere. While everything else about Newman’s book and my own may be different, the motive in both cases is the same.  It is the purpose of this writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations on the meaning and purpose of life, and then with all the startling style in which these riddles were all suddenly satisfied by the answers contained within the Christian Theology.

The writer regards that Theology as amounting to a convincing creed, and one to live by.  But if it is not that, it would at the very least be a recurring and surprising coincidence how regularly it feels like one.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

I.

INTRODUCTION IN DEFENCE OF EVERYTHING ELSE

The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a man who cannot shoot a gun straight is dignified when he accepts a duel. When some time ago I published a series of hasty but sincere papers, under the name of Heretics, several critics for whose intellect I have a warm respect (I may mention specially Mr. G.S.Street) said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to disbelieve this or that cosmic theory of the universe, but that I had carefully avoided supporting my own worldview with example.

"I will begin to worry about my philosophy," said Mr. Street, "when Mr. Chesterton has given us his."

It was perhaps an impulsive suggestion to make to a person who is only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation.

But just because Mr. Street has in one sense inspired and created this book, that doesn’t mean he necessarily has to read it. If he does read it, however, he will find that in its pages I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it.

God and humanity made it; and it made me.

I have often had a desire to write a novel about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.  I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of a philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be Buckingham Palace, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you were to assume that this man felt like a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale.

His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for.

For you see: what could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad to a new and exotic land combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales.

And here we reach what I believe to be the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner, the main problem of this book.

How can we hope to be at once astonished at the world and yet feel right at home in it?  How can this curious cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honor of being our hometown?

To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument; and this is the path that I here propose to follow.

I wish to set forth my faith as one that is entirely able to answer this double spiritual need: the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance. For the very word "romance" has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome.

Anyone setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I presume that the majority of people reading this crave for themselves, is the desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired.

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.

But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need to view the world this way if we wish to be able to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.

It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.

But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England. For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England.

I do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull.  Dullness will, however, free me from the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant.  Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact for my own soul that this is the thing of which I am generally accused.

I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a smug, clever defense of something that is entirely indefensible. If it were actually true (as has been said) that Mr. George Bernard Shaw made his living as a writer upon this type of disingenuous paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes.  It is as easy as lying; because it is lying.

The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he believes it to be the truth.  I find myself under the same intolerable bondage.  I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human moments of vanity, and may have thought something funny because I had said it.

It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist.  It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take child-like pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.  One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths.  And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a tiresome joke.

For if this book is a joke it is a joke against me.  I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.  If there is an element of embarrassment in what follows, the mockery is at my own expense; for this book explains how I proudly thought I was the first to set foot in Buckingham Palace only to humbly find out I was the last.  It recounts my grandiose and lavish adventures in pursuit of the obvious.

No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.

I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century.  I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age.  Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth.  And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it.

I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths.  And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine.   When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.

It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion.  The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe.

I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account of this happy fiasco.  It might amuse a friend or an enemy to read how I gradually began to learn from the wisdom of some old legend, or from the falsehood of some popular modern philosophy, things that I might have learned from my catechism – if I had ever actually learned it.

There may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I found at last in a socialist club or a pagan Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church.  If anyone is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in a poem, 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.  But there is in everything a reasonable division of labor.  I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

I add one final note which comes, as a note naturally should, at the beginning of the book. These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the best source of energy and sound ethics. They are not intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed.

When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed.  I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it.

This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography. But if anyone wants my opinions about the actual nature of the authority of Christendom, Mr. G.S.Street has only to throw me another challenge, and I will write him another book.