Orthodoxy

First published in 1908, G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is a spirited defence of Christian belief, written with the wit, paradox and intellectual exuberance that distinguish one of England’s most original essayists. Conceived as a companion to Heretics, it answers the challenge that Chesterton had criticised the prevailing philosophies of his age without offering a philosophy of his own. What follows is a distinctly personal journey of discovery, tracing how his attempts to forge an unconventional worldview led him, unexpectedly, towards the ancient traditions of Christianity. Along the way, he takes on materialism, rationalism and fashionable scepticism, finding in wonder, gratitude and the mysteries of existence reasons to resist the disenchantment of the modern world.

Neither a conventional theological treatise nor a straightforward autobiography, Orthodoxy is a dazzling succession of arguments, digressions and startling turns of thought. Chesterton’s celebrated paradoxes illuminate his conviction that intellectual freedom need not require the abandonment of tradition, and that the familiar world becomes more extraordinary when viewed with renewed attention. The chapters on fairy tales, human nature and the paradoxes of Christian doctrine remain especially characteristic of his imaginative approach to philosophy. Written fourteen years before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, the book stands as a defining statement of his religious thought and a landmark of twentieth-century Christian apologetics, as engaging for its literary personality as for the ideas it defends.

From the book

“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...We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. ”

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

On Orthodoxy

“Ontological basics retailed with a blissful, zooming frivolity, Thomas Aquinas meets Eddie Van Halen.”

— James Parker, The Atlantic