Summary
Chesterton wrote this as a companion piece to his early work ‘Heretic’. He wishes to document his own views and how he got to them.
I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
Chesterton reminds me of a Churchill or Benjamin Franklin in the way in which his ratio of memorable sentences per page asymptotically approaches 1. Every paragraph has gems that beg to be plastered on some living room wall in garish curly-q font:
if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.
or maybe in a more strange house with a bigger empty space you could find this quote:
The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
Chesterton spends most of his time in the lunatic asylum in this book because he feels like that is where the modern age belongs. He makes some really great points around unanchored rationality. He argues that people are sent to the asylum not for having too little rationality, but because they have too much rationality.
The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.
He feels like this is the situation the materialist finds himself in, that is to say his system is completely logical but also detached from lived experience in the same way that the lunatic makes theories like castles in the air.
Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of today is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.
To Chesterton, the world feels like so much more than colliding billiard balls because it is more. He refuses to look at the world as dead process but instead as a living and enchanted world :
The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about “a law” that he has never seen who is the mystic.
Summing it up in the book’s most famous quotation:
All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork….. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
He later on expands on his reasoning behind viewing the world as a living and therefore fundamentally irrational thing:
Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.
Chesterton experienced this feeling of the “silent swerving” of the magical universe in the irrationalities of Christianity. Every point on the surface where Christianity appears to break the symmetry and be mistaken it actually has anticipated some non-symmetry in reality that would have been overlooked by a mathematical model. Ultimately it was this deep accuracy of Christianity that drew Chesterton to it. He found that over and over again it was most correct when it looked most wrong. He found Christianity to be like a living parent that guided him through an inexplicable universe full of wonder, mystery, and adventure.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
Thoughts
This book is a master piece, a triumph of rhetoric. I picture Chesterton as a Catholic gladiator going out to do battle with the early 20th century. His writing is intuitive and immediately make sense. A very entertaining read and well worth anyone’s time. It will probably go down as one of the most compelling apologetics of all time. I am afraid to list objections because of the bias that comes with negativity, and I don’t want to detract from the book so I will confine myself to one critique which is similar to the thoughts I had on ‘Heretic’ and that is that when you read Chesterton you walk into a forest of paradox. Some of these paradoxes are useful and illuminating while others feel contrived to fit a point. I’ll take this as an example:
I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high human nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence—the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex.
I may be missing something, but it seems like virginity and love of children (sexual innocence included) are not same, but are made to look the same through a clever turn of phrase. Overall, the best way I can describe it is that it would be similar to listening to Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry. It makes for the best conversation imaginable, in one paragraph he convinces you that the universe is big and glorious and that is man is a small and tiny thing and just when you acknowledge the accuracy of that sentiment, he overturns it, and convinces you that man is a big and glorious thing, and the universe outside him tiny and insignificant.
People/G.K. Chesterton