Heretics

First published in 1905, G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics is a spirited collection of essays challenging the intellectual fashions and fashionable certainties of the early twentieth century. With characteristic wit, exuberance and a gift for turning familiar arguments upside down, Chesterton examines the ideas of contemporaries including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, questioning the assumptions beneath their visions of art, politics, progress and human nature. His concern is not simply to expose the weaknesses of individual thinkers, but to challenge a culture increasingly suspicious of tradition while remaining curiously uncritical of its own convictions. For Chesterton, every serious philosophy rests on a vision of the universe, whether its author acknowledges it or not.

Part literary criticism, part philosophical provocation, Heretics is animated by Chesterton’s conviction that the modern world has mistaken rebellion for originality and scepticism for intellectual freedom. His arguments unfold through comic reversals, vivid analogies and paradoxes that remain as entertaining as they are unsettling, even when his judgments invite disagreement. The book also marks an important moment in Chesterton’s intellectual development: its challenge to the prevailing philosophies of his age would lead directly to Orthodoxy (1908), his more personal account of the Christian convictions that shaped his worldview. Read today, Heretics offers both a spirited portrait of Edwardian intellectual life and an introduction to one of English literature’s most distinctive defenders of tradition, wonder and the art of thinking against the grain.

From the book

“Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.”

— G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

On Chesterton

"In reading Chesterton... I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." 

— C.S. Lewis