G.K. Chesterton Heretics – Monday Update of May 13th, 2013

The title says it all. You may, or may not, be interested in such a harsh term, but for those who are…

Heretics – So I happen to prefer the Barnes and Noble cover for this book, but feel free to interchange it with any of the numerous printed and eBook editions of the same book. Thankfully for us all, many of Chesterton’s most famous works exist out of copyright in the United States or in relatively cheap eBook form, so that seems recommendation enough. Still, if you’ve not had exposure to the style of Chesterton, allow me to explain.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton remains one of the pre-eminent Catholic thinkers, apologists, debaters, public speakers, poets, novelists, essayist, and short story writers of the 20th century. Somehow, he disappeared in the public mind, though the reasons become apparent if you read a little further into this blog post. He wrote so much material that we find ourselves sorting through the reams and reams of material even now. Still, to remove that element of overwhelming dread at the process of picking a random book, might I recommend a few from my personal reading?

Of course, everyone seems to recommend his Father Brown stories. Think of them as the religious versions of Sherlock Holmes, contained in one short chapter and coming to an interesting theological conclusion. However, he became more well known for his “defense” of the faith in numerous treatises on the subject. “Defense”, though, makes Chesterton sound like a serious writer, which he most certainly is NOT. Nor does Chesterton come at a conclusion from the straightforward path; rather, he meanders around the central point and ends up making a hundred tiny, yet seriously consistent, argumentation regarding small issues.

In Heretics, for example, we find that Chesterton barely talks about the title of the whole work. And this is precisely because the word had no meaning in his current context, as it really has none for ours either. “heresy”, by definition, implies some belief in something, but our Western society believes in much of nothing (or supposed “nothing”). We attempt to remove the chain of dogma – the bastion of solid, objective beliefs that tie directly to reality – to establish our own in its place. We think this leads to a growth of tolerance, of diversity, of knowledge, and of that much over-used sense of “progress”.

Unfortunately, it never occurs to us that the more we think about anything, the more precise we become with our beliefs, our words, our definitions, and our concrete view of the world. We don’t escape the realm of dogma, but establish our own in its place – the dogma of no dogma, the belief in no belief. As Chesterton says himself:

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

Chesterton’s not above using humor and paradox to note that distinctly irrational faculty of man, faith. The more we try to find our way out of our own impulses and nature, the more we find ourselves fitted into that same mold. We just happen to direct it into faulty and problematic ends as we erect a reality opposed to the really real reality (take that as a grammar joke).

Think of it in this sense: a heresy consists less of the whole truth and more of an “aspect” of the truth. Surely you’ve heard that before – we only know so much, how could you be so smug to think X or Y actually was the case, etc. Knowing things in the definite sense appears a sort of arrogance, while attesting to you own ignorance suddenly amounts to humility. So do the heretics emphasize one particular portion of the truth, out of proportion to its relation to reality in general.

Imagine it in this sense: suppose you and a few friends sail along on a rather sturdy boat with a sail and a rudder. For a time, the boat sails fine on the ocean, able to traverse the great expanse with ease. You find yourself utterly satisfied with the shape, function, and speed of the boat because, hey, that’s how boats work, and you find pleasure in that simple joy. However, your friends are none too impressed; they think the boat needs some additional adjustments. Not having too much material on hand, they quarrel over how to improve the function of your tiny vessel, whether by improving the rudder’s range of motion or changing the size of the sail through a larger mast. Both men end up putting holes in the boat to augment the individual capacities of the craft.

Unfortunately, their myopia makes your boat sink, and a ship with holes in it sinks regardless of how good a rudder you’ve got, or how great a sail you have. It’s the whole boat, not just the individual parts, that make for successful sailing – sometimes we’re just too blind to see that.

This is why many call him a “complete thinker” – he attempts to link every sphere of life, living, and thought into a single whole. That whole, of course, comes from Christianity (Catholicism). Religion, contrary to what you might imagine, contains everything. You must eliminate your own cultural assumptions to see it. Chesterton seeks to unite his beliefs with the whole of reality, and sees it as THE whole of reality. To see it in another way simply moves beyond what’s actually there in front of you. You cannot change the objective reality; you only accept what’s already there.

As an obvious conclusion, then, what’s already there was the Church. Christianity, for Chesterton (and increasingly for myself) displays a weird philosophical common sense. The more you investigate it, the more its ideas, creeds, dogmas (please just get over that Catholic terminology you Protestant), and beliefs make more and more sense. I’m not sure if that makes any logical, rational sense – then again, YHWH is not the God of the Philosophers, by any measure!

I find Chesterton’s view fascinating, and I hope you’ll take a look at his works. There’s many places to find them for free, from Amazon to Project Gutenberg to Christian Classics Ethereal Library. I, of course, recommend Orthodoxy and Heretics, but I am biased in the extreme!