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Orthodoxy
G. K. Chesterton
(The Bodley Head, 1908)
How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? 1
—G. K. Chesterton
In Christian circles today, numerous conversations are taking place regarding disenchantment and re-enchantment. The argument in its simplest form is as follows: In prior ages, pagan religions often deified and worshiped the natural world. In modern times, because of advances in the sciences, the world has been disabused of the belief that nature itself is divine.2 Yet in many ways, the modern project has overstepped its bounds, stripping the world of all that gave it meaning and purpose in the process. Some even argue that the current situation has progressed to the point that enchantment is returning from its banishment, but with a raging ferocity. Starved of meaning, many today are once again sliding into the pagan instinct to worship anything and everything under the sun.3
G. K. Chesterton predicted this situation over one hundred years ago. “Religion is returning from her exile,” he observed, “it is more likely that the future will be crazily and corruptly superstitious than that it will be merely rationalist.”4In his masterpiece Orthodoxy, he contends that the dilemma that besets all religion and philosophy is how to rationally comprehend the world and yet retain a sense of wonder without reverting into pagan superstition. He refers to this as a double need: “Nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need….to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.”5 Written in 1908, this work is widely acknowledged to be one of Chesterton’s most enduring masterpieces. In it, he describes how he set out to reconcile these competing needs by surveying all the ways in which the world has tried to resolve the dilemma. Chesterton argues that out of all the creeds ever devised, be they the sacralizing creeds of the ancient pagans, or the desecrating creed of the modern rationalist, Christianity best satisfies this double need. He argues that Christianity alone answers our desire to take delight in creation, without either undue adulation or utter pessimism. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton shows us how Christianity thoroughly enchants the world in the best possible way.
Pagan Hyper-Enchantment. Worshiping creation was a tendency of the pagan religions of old. For most ancients, Nature was not simply enchanted, but hyper-enchanted to such a degree that it was worthy of reverence. These typically polytheistic systems often deified the natural world such that the supernatural was immanent — being in and of the natural order — rather than transcendent. Yet such nature worship inevitably led to the elevation of the unnatural, Chesterton observes. “A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability,” he writes, “and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty.”6 Nature worship’s fatal flaw is its failure to distinguish between the goodness and fallenness of creation.
We must acknowledge that something has gone terribly wrong in the world to avoid this extreme of enchantment. There is a thread of cruelty woven into the fabric of reality, and something must be positioned over and above nature, insisting that we do not imitate it. The God of Christianity stands outside His creation, not unlike how a poet stands outside a poem he has composed. The God of the Bible is transcendent. Likewise, the cruelty we observe is not native to the natural order. Chesterton notes that the Christian creed enables properly ordered enchantment. We can experience awe regarding our marvellous world but are protected from being compelled to bow down before it. “Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister,” he writes. “We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.”7
Pessimist Disenchantment. In contrast, the modern rationalist sees creation’s cruel thread and interprets it as proof that nature is without purpose. For him, the universe is comprised of nothing more than energy and matter that behaves according to impersonal and fixed laws. This idea forms the core of the Darwinist creed of aimlessness and chance, where life arises out of the blind processes of random mutation and natural selection. Any appearance of purpose, even our sense of wonder at the world, is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes because it conferred some kind of survival value in our evolutionary past. Our sense of the sacred is really a lie and the world is incorrigibly disenchanted.
Ironically, this opposite approach to enchantment is just as unnatural as the pagan’s. In stripping the world of purpose and meaning, humanity is made susceptible to a cruelty equally as destructive as nature worship. If value and purpose are illusions, anything is permissible. More importantly, modern pessimism always ends in a kind of deterministic fatalism. He notes that not only does the skeptic do away with Original Sin with his destruction of objective morality, but he also destroys grounds for giving hope to the sinner. Determinism is ultimately not consistent with the “generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle.”8 In the end, this view ends up emptying the world of all that is best. “[I]f the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos,” Chesterton writes. “The thing has shrunk….the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial.”9
Christian Re-Enchantment. The ancient pagan was too optimistic about this world, reading too much sacredness into it without taking stock of its deviance, while the modern, atheistic scientist is too pessimistic with his desacralizing creed. It might be that neither of these approaches is entirely wrong. Chesterton contends that Christianity is positive on both accounts — namely, that the world is glorious and charged with meaning, but it is plagued by a non-native futility that distorts it, nonetheless. We can see the world as enchanted, but we must remember that it has been subjected to frustration and is in “bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:21 ESV).
The doctrine of the Fall is the key to understanding the tension. Chesterton returns to the analogy of the artist. “God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play,” he argues, 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.”10 And, of course, we must not forget that the core of our creed is that He is not so transcendent as to refrain from entering the final act to rescue the whole show.
Chesterton likens the proper Christian feeling towards the world’s current state to how Robinson Crusoe felt after being shipwrecked on an island with a scant but precious supply of remnants from civilized life. For Stevenson’s hero, the preciousness of the items was heightened by their hairbreadth escape from total loss.
Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.11
This world of ours is not unlike that broken ship, with humanity being Stevenson’s Crusoe. Therefore, we are correct in our intuition that we do not fully belong to this world, for like Crusoe, we are the survivors of a terrible shipwreck (or exiles from a perfect Garden). Additionally, this world is still good, even though it is fallen. Chesterton writes that Christianity alone satisfies this “instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship,” and “we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.”12
Unlike the Nature worshiper, the Christian can at once see the sacred in this world without overlooking its frustration. Similarly, unlike the modern skeptic, the Christian knows that corruption is not inherent to this world but rather speaks of a good play that has gone wrong. Futility is neither original to its design, nor is it the final answer. For Chesterton, Christianity affirms our persistent sense of being “homesick at home” for we are exiles in a corrupted world.13
Repercussions of Christian Enchantment. The consequence of Christianity embodying the perspectives of both ancient pagan and modern cynic reverberates down the millennia since our Lord’s Passion. It fosters a kind of loyalty to existence that frees one up to love the world enough to protect its sacredness yet hate the world’s darkness enough to resist conforming to it. Chesterton calls the Christian view that of a cosmic patriot, comparing the feeling it inspires to that of a true patriot who loves his country enough to both fight for it and still criticize it. “The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love,” he writes, “the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.”14
The Christian creed advocates an unwavering love of this world that protects its dimmed grandeur but refuses to turn a blind eye to its cruelty. This blending of the pagan and pessimist perspectives is not a mere mixing to produce a less concentrated version of both, so that neither impulse dominates. On the contrary, Chesterton argues that in Christianity, both instincts are retained with all their fiery impulses intact. Christianity “separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both.”15 Chesterton writes, “On this system one could fight all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence. One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with the world.”16
Christianity’s “balance of apparent contradictions” is the only approach to enchantment post-Fall that succeeds.17 Many areas of life are directly influenced by this double approach — from art to architecture to astronomy. It will suffice to use one example of the effects of Christianity’s approach to enchantment. The case of human dignity stands out as perhaps the most important instance where improper enchantment has caused the greatest damage. Pagan and pessimist alike cannot find sufficient grounds to protect this most precious of remnants from the shipwreck.
Enchantment and Human Dignity. Regarding human dignity, Chesterton begins by returning to the pagan and modern views. Once again, we see that the two converge in cruel ends in their attempts to address the apparent greatness of humanity and its equally as clear wretchedness. There is a tension between humankind’s obvious variance with respect to all of creation, and yet our utter vulnerability to it. Mankind may be the result of eons of evolution, as some scientists claim, but it is equally clear that he is a revolution out of all that has been made, Chesterton writes elsewhere.18 Nevertheless, his existence is as precarious as that of the beasts of the field. Chesterton notes that both pagan and agnostic alike arrive at a sort of bland midpoint between these two extremes. He writes that the “average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them.”19
Chesterton observes that this position is quite rational, save for one significant objection. Namely, such a reductive blending of human greatness and wretchedness leads to a kind of resignation between the two that ends up devaluing what is rationalized. Human dignity is diminished because such a diluted pride does not “lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this,” and such “mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal.”20 In other words, on this view, human dignity is not so precious as to merit fighting for it with every last breath. This perspective is also too weak to grasp the depths of depravity in every human heart, which necessitates the radical redemption that Christianity offers. Such a dilution “loses both the poetry of being proud,” Chesterton concludes, “and the poetry of being humble.”21
Here, as in many other areas, Christianity maintains the two extremes so apparent in humanity. It even exaggerates them, Chesterton observes, yet still reconciles them:
In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners….We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god.22
The effect was a profound clarity with respect to human nature that, with a single gaze, sees its foolishness and still believes in its salvation. “One can hardly think too little of one’s self,” Chesterton writes, and “One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.”23
Among all the creeds that Chesterton surveyed, only the story of beloved image-bearers bounded by Original Sin best preserves human dignity. History thus reveals that as the Christian creed worked its way through human culture, age-old institutions such as slavery and caste, which had become quite entrenched in pagan thinking, slowly began to crumble. As Chesterton writes, “Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin, but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king.”24 At the foot of the Cross, the greatest and the least are made equal. In the modern era, this story continues to be the only effective defense against dehumanizing advances in areas such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence.
Stereoscopic Enchantment. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton contends that Christianity’s unique capacity to hold a tension between opposing extremes, without succumbing to either, creates in its followers a view of the world that is “stereoscopic.”25 The Christian can “see two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for it.”26 This sort of vision allows for a simultaneous acceptance of contradictory realities such as humankind’s greatness and wretchedness, or creation’s goodness and fallenness, while still maintaining each “at the top of their energy.”27 In Orthodoxy, Chesterton also compares the Christian disposition towards other disparate realities, including the tension between human freedom and God’s sovereignty, the profanity of suicide and the glory of martyrdom, and unconditional forgiveness and absolute justice. The question one must ask is how?
Chesterton answers that the Christian creed accomplishes this impossible feat because at its core are two realities equally as contradictory as all the extremes of this world: the tremendous figure of the God-Man Christ, and His humiliating crucifixion. Regarding the former, he writes that Christianity “has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God.”28 Indeed, Christianity emphatically declares that in His perfection, our Lord was more human than we are. Chesterton writes,
His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city….Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell.29
The crucifixion likewise unites an extraordinary paradox. Chesterton observes that the Cross is simultaneously “a collision and a contradiction.”30 This is perhaps most evident in our Lord’s dereliction, which Chesterton describes as “the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.”31 He writes,
[I]n that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism.32
Given the profound mysteries of the Incarnation and Passion of our Lord, Chesterton concludes that Christianity is uniquely able to navigate the mysterious extremes of this world, without falling “into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration” which have long plagued humanity.33 “It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands,” he writes, “ but to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages.”34 Ultimately, the greatest mystery at the heart of our faith — that God was forsaken of God for our sake — turns out to lay the greatest foundation for proper enchantment of the world. G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy remains one of the most masterfully argued testimonies to this wondrous truth.
Rebekah Valerius holds a BS in biochemistry from The University of Texas at Arlington and an MA in apologetics from Houston Christian University. She is the president and a senior fellow at the Society for Women of Letters.
NOTES
- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; Hendrickson, 2006), 4.
- See Andrés Felipe Barrero Salinas, “Max Weber on Disenchantment: Is Religion Obsolete?,” The Collector, May 31, 2023, https://www.thecollector.com/max-weber-disenchantment-world-religion/.
- See Rebekah Valerius, “Bespoke Religiosity and the Rise of the Nones: A Review of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tara Isabella Burton,” Christian Research Journal 43 no. 03 (2020), https://www.equip.org/articles/bespoke-religiosity-and-the-rise-of-the-nones-a-review-of-strange-rites-new-religions-for-a-godless-world-by-tara-isabella-burton/.
- G. K. Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks, ed. Dorothy Collins (Elek, 1975).
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 5.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 71.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 109.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 20–21.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 19.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 73.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 58–59.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 74.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 73.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 62.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 90.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 73.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 23.
- G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Angelico Press, 2013), 18. “Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.”
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 89.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 89.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 90.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 90.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 90.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 153.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 23.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 23.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 88.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 88.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 155.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 23.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 135.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 135.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 96.
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 97.
