My incessant gasps were potent portents to my comparative illiteracy. I can’t contain them given the passion I feel for both wisdom and literary dexterity. The setting was my office as I work on a classical education curriculum project. We have covered Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. We considered Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as well as The Federalist Papers. But now comes the master of the written word, G.K. Chesterton and his master work, Orthodoxy.
It was my habit in working on this project to sometimes dog-ear and sometimes underline key passages I want future students to discuss. With GK Chesterton in general and Orthodoxy in particular there is no point in marking the book up. Opening the book to any page is like opening an oven filled with baking bread. You are stunned by the heat, delighted by the aroma. Which is why I find myself simply reading this passage and that, all while giggling like a schoolgirl, laughing at the glory.
If you are familiar with the book, you know of what I speak. If you are unfamiliar with the book, well, that is something we shall have to remedy. Chesterton writes in a genre all his own, the personal apologetic. He highlights his own journey into embracing “mere” Christianity, framing it as a sailor who journeys to the ends of the earth, only to “discover” that he had never left home. Chesterton, in a manner vastly superior to cold-hearted impossibility-of-the-contrary worldview jockeys, demonstrates that Christianity is not only true, but native to us. It is less that the Christian faith fits the God shaped hole in our souls, more that Christianity makes us fill the us-sized hole in the universe.
Though Orthodoxy is sometimes published as a companion piece to Heretics, Chesterton’s slicing up the modernist worldview like an As Seen on TV kitchen appliance, and was in fact written on purpose as a companion piece, Orthodoxy does still from time to time go on the offensive. In the chapter The Ethics of Elfland, Chesterton performs a veritable apologetical symphony, showing the modernist world for a rickety machine, while at the same time opening our eyes to wonder. It is daunting, dizzying, delightful.
Reading Chesterton is no easy thing. It is, as I like to describe it, like eating a buffet of desserts. Every taste is so rich that you both want more, and can take only so much. He is to be savored. In the end you end up with a fat soul, prosperous and joyful. Orthodoxy is a life-changing, even a life giving book, not because it will change your view on this thing or that, not because it will persuade you of your error in thinking this other thing. Instead reading Orthodoxy is like riding a cyclone, crushing the enemy, and then walking out, for the first time, into a world of color. Get it, read it. Then thank God, and send me a note too.