Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82779 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1515 pages

From Amazon.com
If G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith is, as he called it, a "slovenly autobiography," then we need more slobs in the world. This quirky, slender book describes how Chesterton came to view orthodox Catholic Christianity as the way to satisfy his personal emotional needs, in a way that would also allow him to live happily in society. Chesterton argues that people in western society need a life of "practical romance, the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." Drawing on such figures as Fra Angelico, George Bernard Shaw, and St. Paul to make his points, Chesterton argues that submission to ecclesiastical authority is the way to achieve a good and balanced life. The whole book is written in a style that is as majestic and down-to-earth as C.S. Lewis at his best. The final chapter, called "Authority and the Adventurer," is especially persuasive. It's hard to imagine a reader who will not close the book believing, at least for the moment, that the Church will make you free. --Michael Joseph Gross

From AudioFile
G.K. Chesterton put his philosophy of Christianity to paper in 1908, responding to the popularity of humanism with "a set of mental pictures" that stated his argument. Read by Simon Vance, those mental pictures come alive in a way that echoes Chesterton's original intent: to be at times poetic while maintaining the rhetorical style of an expert debater. While listening, the thought of Chesterton reading his work on a podium is likely to come to mind. Chesterton devoted too much of "Orthodoxy" to specific answers to religion's critics from his era. While you might remember H.G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw, references to their views on faith make these passages sound dated and dilute their overall effectiveness. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Ingram
An attack in 1903 against Christianity impelled writer/theologian Chesterton to seize the gauntlet of refutation. Orthodoxy is the result. 5 cassettes.

Customer Reviews

an entertaining read, even when you violently disagree
Chesterton was a gleefully confessed madman and a genius with language, but he's also very "Johnsonian" in his own way--and by that I mean that much like dear Dr. Johnson he says everything so well ... that sometimes you're so delighted by the prosity that you don't consider the message. I'm less blinded by the textual pyrotechnics than I once was, and I'm less wholeheartedly dazzled by the philosophy than I once found myself ... but it's still an interesting read and it still makes some remarkable so-obvious-you-never-noticed-it observations about life, the universe and everything.

The best thing you can say about Chesterton is that you don't have to agree with him to enjoy reading him.

I wanted to like this book
I myself recently returned to the Catholic church, and I really wanted to like Chesterton's book. And I did *enjoy* it. His style is entertaining, and as a long-time C. S. Lewis fan I now know where Lewis got his own style.

But in the end, what Chesterton seemed to have written was not Why I am a Christian or Why I am a Catholic, but Why I am a European. And he seems to have thought this amounted to the same thing.

His dismissal of Islam as being cruel and suited to people from dry places is astonishing. His dismissal of knowing God within as leading to....Tibet is likewise astonishing! A lot of his argument seems to be prejudice dressed up as reasons. That he likes romance and adventure, and finds Christianity romantic and adventurous is all very well, but if Christianity is true, it is intended for Tibet and the dry places of the earth as well as the cozy English countryside that he loves.

A detective's romance
Before his series of Father Brown mysteries, G.K. Chesterton wrote "Orthodoxy," an autobiographical 'detective' story of how he came to believe the Christian faith. Drawing from "the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy...an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church," Mr. Chesterton playfully and inductively reasons his way toward the one worldview that best explains and preserves the phenomena in the world he found around himself.

The world around Mr. Chesterton was rife with Modernism in the early twentieth century. Based on philosophies of the late nineteenth century, religious and political traditions were being questioned. Anarchism, communism, and socialism were the parlor topics of the day; the merely symbolic importance of religion was being settled upon. These are the roots of our post-modern society today in which the meaning of nearly everything (even words, according to literary deconstructionists) is now in doubt. At one point in the chapter entitled "The Suicide of Thought," Mr. Chesterton quips, "We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." An exaggeration even today, undoubtedly. Still, we have traveled quite a distance philosophically since the era before the World Wars, and "Orthodoxy" is an excellent snapshot of where we've come from.

But be warned: This snapshot captures a lot of active thought. It took me a couple of reads over as many years to get a handle on the structure of the book, and now the rest of it has been becoming clearer to me. Part of the problem is Mr. Chesterton's writing style. There is much playfulness in his language, and a reader could mistakenly conclude that the author's reasoning relies heavily upon wordplay, the turn of a phrase to turn the tables on his opponents. It can become frustrating if one isn't careful. Mr. Chesterton himself acknowledges this impression, "Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise the most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused." But don't miss the meat for the gravy (or the salad for the dressing, as your case may be). The potency of his arguments doesn't rely on his clever semantics but on his connections between observed facts and the ancient, corresponding orthodoxy of Christianity. Mr. Chesterton has fun with words because he can, not because he needs to.

This mixture of cleverness and careful thinking ultimately leads Mr. Chesterton to this conclusion: Christian faith is well-reasoned trust in Christ. And the desire for well-reasoned trust is a "practical romance," as Mr. Chesterton calls it--a need in the ordinary person for "the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure...an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." A way to accept the knowable while looking beyond it toward what is yet to be known.

Mr. Chesterton wrote "Orthodoxy" for people looking for that kind of romance. "If anyone is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book." However, this book isn't for everyone. "If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing." The inconvincible cannot be convinced. Yet the skeptical (such as Mr. Chesterton once was) can be because they are the doubters who're still looking around. I myself come from a skeptic's background and regard "Orthodoxy" as a plausible, if sometimes difficult to comprehend, and wonderful way someone can come to trust the claims of Christianity.