Ray Waddle on Chesterton's "Orthodoxy"

Book's exuberant truths still impact readers a century later
By RAY WADDLE • February 16, 2008

A century ago, a new book about belief was unleashed, and its zany impact still reverberates.

For Lent, I've been reading it. Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton, seems too entertaining for Lent's sober purposes. But it's just like Chesterton to be funny in a dead-serious way.


These days his quotes flood the Internet:

• "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

• "He is a (sane) man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.''

• "Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.''

British journalist Chesterton did everything with gusto, if not excess. He wrote incessantly.

He weighed nearly 400 pounds. His debating rivals admitted he was a man of vigor, surprise and mirth.

His writing inspired C.S. Lewis' turn to Christianity.

Today, Chesterton Societies everywhere pay homage to his spirit. He thought Christian belief a matter of joy and sanity. Yet the world still nervously evades his sort of religious exuberance.

In Orthodoxy, he declares: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

He was irreverently anti-modern. He found modernity's solemn secularism hilarious. He thought it far more liberal and free-thinking to be free to believe in miracles than to be straitjacketed in rationalistic doctrines that deny life's every mystery.

Chesterton hated concentrations of money and power. He blamed them on modern life's self-defeating denial of the obvious — sin. Society would be better armed against human evils if it acknowledged the fact of sin.

In Orthodoxy he warns that rationalism without humor, charity or poetry leads to madness and oppression. Religion is saner; it's truer to life's strangeness. The world's meaning is found outside the world: Life has an Author.

Chesterton had flaws. He conceded little to modern progress or religious pluralism. At times he idealized the Christianized Middle Ages, a futile dream that made him look anti-Jewish.

After Hitler appeared, Chesterton became a stronger defender of Jews.

He died in 1936. He didn't witness World War II, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, or terrorism's latest moral bankruptcy. Perhaps these would disillusion him, the way millions are disillusioned.

But I doubt it. Existence itself was always a shocking wonder to him. It made him grateful for creation, where nothing is trivial because everything holds clues to divine revelation.

His religious witness offered a rare mix — intellectual dazzle and humility. We could use both just now.

Columnist Ray Waddle, a former Tennessean religion editor, can be reached at
ray@raywaddle.com.