Read This Book!

G.K. Chesterton argues in his Orthodoxy that orthodoxy is anything but dull and musty, but on the contrary, exciting and adventuresome.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD, Professor of Dogmatic and Systematic Theology at Franciscan University

Chesterton, as a writer of and for the human imagination, might be the best evangelist in an age where truth is not allowed to enter, and beauty has been replaced by the obscene.

Not since Pascal compiled eight hundred or so fragments of religious insight into what would become his life’s work—a masterpiece of apologetics which he left unfinished at his death in 1670—has there been anything to match the sheer beauty and persuasiveness of the Pensées. Until, that is, G.K. Chesterton came along to give us Orthodoxy, a work which, in the judgment of many, may never be surpassed in its brilliant and original defense of the Christian religion. And to think that he had not yet become a Roman Catholic when he sat down to write it in 1908. Conversion would come only years later in 1922.

Nevertheless, upon his death in 1936, his widow would receive a telegram signed by His Holiness, the pope, declaring her husband “Defender of the Faith,” a title last conferred three centuries before upon King Henry VIII, who, prior to ending a thousand or more years of allegiance to the One True Church, had defended her against Martin Luther’s assertions. How Chesterton would have savored the irony of that.

Which brings us back to Orthodoxy and why, as an exercise in Catholic apologetics, it has made such an impact—or should for those who still haven’t read it. Choose any chapter you like and the argument laid out in its pages will quite take your breath away. Consider, for example, a paragraph or two from Chapter IV, “The Ethics of Elfland,” in which he describes how the great truths of the faith came to him through the fairy tales told to him as a little child. “My first and last philosophy,” he calls them. “The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now…”

So, what are these things?  

There is the lesson of “Cinderella,” which is the same as that of the Magnificat—exaltavit humiles. There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved before it is lovable. There is the terrible allegory of the “Sleeping Beauty,” which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep.

What all these stories awaken, of course, is a sense of wonder, which feeds on the child’s innate capacity to be astonished. Proof for which, argues Chesterton, is the fact that among the very young there is really no need for fairy tales at all. 

Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic.

Only a child, says Chesterton, could possibly read a modern novel steeped in starkest realism and not become bored.

This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

And here Chesterton will strike the mightiest chord of all, namely, the necessity for gratitude, the cultivation of which alone confers true happiness. “We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?” And since we are all beggars before that great banquet table of being—recipients of a gift none of us could ever give—why shouldn’t we feel moved to say thanks?  
“What did the first frog say?” asks Chesterton. “And the answer was, ‘Lord, how you made me jump!’ That says succinctly all that I am saying. God made the frog jump; but the frog prefers jumping.” Thus does Chesterton introduce the reader, “for the pleasure of pedantry,” to what he is wont to call “the Doctrine of Conditional Joy,” found in every fairy tale ever told.

And how exactly does it work?

The note of the fairy utterance always is, “You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word ‘cow’”; or “You may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show her an onion.” The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. 

Do you see where this is going? To belong to fairyland, to become a true denizen of so enchanted a city, requires that you obey something you cannot fully understand. 

In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human loves are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone. 

No more vivid or expressive way to account for the Fall of Angels and Men could possibly be imagined. That happiness, whether human or angelic, should turn on a single uncomprehending choice: To obey, or not to obey? That is the question. And how could any of us know in advance of taking the test? 

If Cinderella says, “How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?” her godmother might answer, “How is it that you are going there till twelve?”…And it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The veto might be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.

It was precisely this paradoxical fact, said Chesterton, that explained why he would never join in the general revolt against monogamy. “Because,” he insisted, 

no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion (the shepherd prince on whom the moon goddess fixed her affections), to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. 

How on earth does one improve upon that? The answer, of course, is that one cannot. No one can. So, plunge right in, reading as much of this amazing man as you can, rejoicing along the way, grateful to God for so great and wonderful a gift.