Reading Orthodoxy: Authority and the Adventurer

Matt Anderson and Trevin Wax are hosting a discussion of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy over the next several weeks. Follow along here. The final chapter, 9, is this week.

This last chapter has a lot going for it, and I’m happy to end on a high note after an ambivalent impression of the last few chapters.

I’m still fairly ambivalent about the project of defending Christianity by defending Christian Europe. It seems that Chesterton gives Christianity credit for all the positives, and explains (rather dismissively) all the negatives as a failure to live up to its own ideals. Still, there is plenty that is unique about Europe and I do think that much of it can be credited to Christianity. Even the most secular scientism presupposes Christian values (cf. Nietzsche).

At any rate, there was plenty in this chapter for me to latch on to. Tellingly, I greatly enjoyed the “apologetics” digression, though to Chesterton it seemed like no more than a necessary bore. But Chesterton is right about materialism dismissing miracles based on dogma. There are only a handful of miracles a Christian must believe based on dogma; practically all reports he may evaluate carefully and weigh the evidence. The explanations available to a Christian are not in conflict with the explanations available to a materialist, they are a superset of them. Christianity is not harmed by showing that a miracle was a fraud (save perhaps the resurrection); materialism really is harmed, and fatally, by showing a miracle is not a fraud. And so they adopt an epistemology that guarantees a miracle can never be proved not to be a fraud. I once had an atheist admit to me, almost in these words, that if a miracle were unrepeatable that was grounds for denying that it was real; but if it were repeatable then it would not be a miracle either, simply a lawlike property of nature (here Chesterton might interject that all laws are miracles!).

I’ve often thought you could take Hume’s argument against miracles, with the immense weight it places on humanity’s experience of the world, at face value and still come up with a good argument for miracles (though, strangely, you might not be able to rationally believe in any particular one). That dead men stay dead is enormously well attested. But as Chesterton points out, across all times and places the existence of the supernatural is also enormously well-attested. You can’t accept one body of evidence and not the other without presupposing your conclusion.

But the most powerful idea in this chapter was of Christianity as a living teacher to the soul, and that resonates deeply with me – though to me it is less important if Christianity explains Europe; it certainly explains me. The living teaching I find in the Bible and the church explain, tutor, and nurture my soul in new ways all the time.

Reading Orthodoxy: The Eternal Revolution and The Romance of Orthodoxy

Matt Anderson and Trevin Wax are hosting a discussion of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy over the next several weeks. Follow along here. Chapters 7 and 8 are this week.

I’m in the strange position of tracking less and less with Chesterton’s argument as he starts discussing Christianity more directly.

This is definitely an argument for Christendom primarily, and the doctrines of Christianity itself only indirectly, insofar as they produced Christendom. In chapter 1 Chesterton claims to be defending Christianity as defined in the Apostle’s Creed, but the focus is definitely on Christian societies and the benefits of Christianity to society.

In chapters 7 and 8, Chesterton makes the case that the ideals of Christianity are actually a better foundation for the goals of secularism, than secularism itself is. Christianity provides the best basis for the reforming of society, for liberty, for love, for democracy. The flow of the argument is wild and creative, as you can expect from Chesterton. But.

In the first place, presenting orthodoxy as nearly synonymous with Christendom, and with Christianity’s capacity for social change, seems to be a small version of Christianity. It is great that Original Sin grounds democracy and equality; and that the Trinity grounds our love for others. But are these the most important things that can be said about Original Sin and the Trinity? Strangely, in a book so focused on narrative and story, he is not telling the story of fall and redemption.

Second is the question of Christianity’s record at some of these social issues. Chesterton says “It does not matter how often humanity fails to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful.” But I think it matters a great deal, especially in an argument such as this, when Christianity fails to imitate its ideal. If Christendom bears little resemblance to the invincible force for social good that Chesterton describes (particularly from the vantage point of a secularist), the obvious conclusion is that Chesterton has mischaracterized Christianity, not that it has just failed to live up to its ideal.

I find the argument much more compelling as a call to Christians for social involvement, and a reminder of the resources we have to draw from to that end, than as a defense of Christianity against competing philosophies.

Reading Orthodoxy: The Paradoxes of Christianity

Matt Anderson and Trevin Wax are hosting a discussion of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy over the next several weeks. Follow along here. Chapter 6 is this week.

I had a hard time knowing how to approach this chapter, for at least two reasons.

First, the flow of the argument is subtle and hard to follow. He begins by describing the many contradictory ways in which Christianity is criticized, and expresses some skepticism that Christianity, even if it was wrong, could really be that wrong. “It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with”. He goes on to explain these paradoxical criticisms as being rooted in strange contradictions of the critic, and of modern life, rather than in Christianity. After expressing surprise that Christianity could really be that wrong, he essentially turns to the criticism on its head, painting modernism as really that wrong.

But then he pivots. Maybe the critics are on to something: “There was really an element in [Christianity] of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism”. And he’s off, explaining the thrilling adventure of orthodoxy. “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious”.

That is a complicated argument. But my second problem is that, now that I know what it is, I am not really sure how to evaluate it. It relies heavily on extrapolation to general principles from specific examples. Chesterton is always making throwaway comments about how many examples he has, and how he only has space for a few. But several more examples would have greatly increased my confidence that the examples he cites are getting at something fundamental about Christianity and the objections to it, rather than being specially picked to prove the point.

I suppose that it is an invitation to go digging more than anything else. Chesterton claims to have found these things to be the case wherever he turned. Having got this idea into your head, do you find it everywhere you turn?

Reading Orthodoxy: The Ethics of Elfland and The Flag of the World

Matt Anderson and Trevin Wax are hosting a discussion of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy over the next several weeks. Follow along here. Chapters 4-5 are this week.

So, The Ethics of Elfland! I liked it so much I will probably not get to The Flag of the World. It has hugely influenced how I think about science and the world.

As I mentioned in my kick-off post, Hume’s critique of any necessary connection between cause and effect really struck me. Surprisingly, not even a probabilistic inference (the sun will probably rise tomorrow because it rose every morning for the past 10,000 years) is valid. His critique was unassailable, and it shook my faith in what I had thought of as the firm things of the world[1].
To my astonishment, Chesterton took this same sentiment (the lack of any real connection between cause and effect) and ran with it: “It is no argument for unalterable law that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it”
But where he moves next is not to despair but to wonder, in a move so obvious in retrospect I’m a little embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it that way. How magnificent it is that the world is so regular and predictable! We have no reason to expect it to be so, or even to expect it to be so tomorrow, and yet it is.

Chesterton has somehow maintained the sense of wonder that you find in very young children. As he says, “A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.” My favorite part of having an infant is getting to observe the wide-eyed wonder with which they regard ordinary things. Everything is new to them, everything is exciting, everything is fascinating. Having children really brought home to me the degree to which we enter the world with no notion at all of what it ought to be like. I think of “how to drink from a cup” to be pretty intuitive, but my one-year-old thought the best way must be to smash his face into the cup.

We’re habituated by long experience to expect the world to be the way that it presents itself to us, and to stop being amazed. But there is no rational basis for this expectation. “When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn…. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a ‘law’, for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen”.

Here I should say something about what a scientific explanation actually is, because an obvious objection is that we do have a scientific explanation for “why does an egg turn into a chicken”. We certainly know a lot more about the process than we did 100 years ago when Orthodoxy was written, but Chesterton’s is no God-of-the-Gaps critique; it cuts too deep.

This is the point: when we say that science has “explained” something, we like to think that it has told us something about the “why”, but this is false. If I answer the question “why does water boil” with a response about heat causing molecular motion, and matter state changes, and atmospheric pressure, I have only described water boiling in other terms, and in greater detail. I have not answered any “why”questions, I have only relocated them – “why do molecules move faster when they are heated?”, etc. And an answer to that question would still be vulnerable to “why?”, on and on. It follows that no matter how much I increase the detail of the explanation, I cannot answer those fundamental “why” questions[2].  At bottom, we accept the world as we find it, just like an infant does. And (via Hume) our association of experience with necessity is not a rational one.

This is not as bad as it might sound at first; but it does inject a note of humility into science. In spite of all the (very real) scientific advances we have made, the world is still a fundamentally strange and wonderful place that we have not tamed and do not understand.

In fairness to scientists, the ones I know have a healthy sense of wonder in their work. I remember a grad-school professor of mine telling us about his work in Biology: “Whenever I’ve gone wrong in my career, it’s because I wasn’t thinking wildly enough” (emphasis his). And physics, of course, has submitted to the bizarre reality of quantum mechanics since Chesterton’s time, which has mostly killed the physical determinism he describes. Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and the halting problem have contributed to a sense of the limitations of human knowledge[3]. Chesterton would have welcomed all of these developments.

The result is that we live in wonderful and contingent world, made more wonderful precisely because it could have been otherwise. Chesterton conveys a unique sense of enjoyment in these features.



[1] By the way, Hume’s critique of miracles in the last chapter of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is totally incompatible with his dismantling of cause and effect earlier in the same book; so much so that it is fairly common to enlist Hume on cause & effect to critique his own argument against miracles; C.S. Lewis does this in Miracles, and Chesterton takes it to be obvious.
[2] Although a good theory will reduce the number of "why" questions that we have, by explaining phenomena in terms of fewer concepts. For instance, relativity explains why mercury is a liquid, why gold is yellow, and a great many other things.
[3] I can’t pass over the topic without highly recommending Logicomix, a fascinating graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and the search for absolute truth; complete with an examination of the relationship between logic and madness!

Reading Orthodoxy: The Maniac and The Suicide of Thought

Matt Anderson and Trevin Wax are hosting a discussion of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy over the next several weeks. Follow along here. Chapters 2-3 are this week.

I continue to be impressed by how forthright Chesterton is about his project. In the closing to chapter 3 he explains

Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business of this book - the rough review of recent thought. After this I begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader, but which, at any rate, interest me.

The Maniac

In the first part of his "rough review of recent thought", Chesterton takes up materialism. The argument, or rather the picture he paints, is of materialism as a species of insanity; in this sense:

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out... it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, of first love or fear upon the sea.

This is something that you either find compelling or you do not; I think there is something to it. Materialism perfectly explains all the small facts of the universe but it does not at all explain the largest and most important ones: love and art, imagination and reason, who we are and what we are doing here. To the extent that it attempts to explain those things it gives dull, empty, unsatisfying answers.

The Suicide of Thought

In Chapter 3 Chesterton defends reason against the modern trends which endanger it: radical skepticism, a false humility which never asserts, and others. But it is a short section on a certain philosophy of evolutionary that I want to highlight. I think, if Chesterton had written Orthodoxy today this would be a longer section.

But if [evolution] means anything more [than that an ape turned slowly into a man], it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into.

I remember being deeply affected by a lecture of Dallas Willard's (which I can't locate now) titled roughly "Do humans have a nature?" A "nature" is a common set of characteristics that we possess just by virtue of being human; particularly (in this case) as it relates to human flourishing. Is "a human" an actual, definite thing or is it in flux, defined only by where we are in an evolutionary trajectory and by what we want to be?

Christianity claims that humans have a nature, and that God's moral law is a description of how beings such as we are can flourish in the world we live in. These are facts about what kind of thing a human is; they are walls. You may beat your head against them but you cannot get beyond them by denying their existence.

This runs counter to the popular understanding (influenced, I think, by this philosophy of evolution) that exalts the will and desires an individual chooses to identify with. If you think that lying or having sex outside of marriage, or any other violation of (say) the 10 commandments will contribute to your happiness in a deep, lasting, meaningful sense you are just wrong.

There is a modern tendency to confuse "who we are" with "what we do", and I think it stems from then same problem. If you do not have a nature, then it must be more or less accurate to associate who you are and what you do. But if your identity is wrapped up in what you do, then I can no longer disapprove of your actions without attacking your being; conversations about moral standards will get very heated and very personal very fast.

But if you have a nature, and a soul, then "who you are" is clearly separable from "what you do" and moral conversations are completely different. I can love and value and accept who you are while warning you against destructive behavior; indeed I must warn you precisely because I care about you.

Reading Orthodoxy: Chapter 1

Matt Anderson and Trevin Wax are hosting a discussion of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy over the next several weeks. Follow along here.

I have a warm relationship with Orthodoxy, because it saved me from David Hume. Flash back to my sophomore year in college, 2 am. I'm sitting in the dorm hallway outside my room, reading Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding which is due later that day[1]. I am mired in a fog of deep skepticism, pulled in by Hume and unable to argue my way back out. The solid things of the world, like cause and effect, seemed to be giving way before my feet. As my roommate walked by on his way to get ready for bed, I stood up and dropped the book on the floor. "Did you know", I asked him in a defeated voice, "that there is no necessary connection between the book hitting the floor and the sound that it made when it did so?" He just gave me a concerned look and said "Gabe, don't get too screwed up".

It was a year or two later that I read Orthodoxy for the first time, and marveled as Chesterton resolved my crisis in about 2 pages - but more on that when we get to chapter 4, "The Ethics of Elfland".

In Chapter 1 Chesterton lays out the project for his book, in a refreshingly honest way. "I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe". That is not the way one would expect a book defending Christian orthodoxy to begin. And even more unexpected is the way he intends to do it: "I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance".

If this is a need of mine, it is not how I would have expressed it. But to speak of safety, permanence, adventure, and joy as Chesterton does certainly has an allure to it. And to suggest that those qualities of life can uniquely be found in the Christian faith is a fascinating thesis. He later speaks of his theme in different terms: "These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostle's Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics". The connection to his "romance of the familiar and unfamiliar" is not immediately clear to me; I'll be watching to see how it plays out in the rest of the book.

But one thing is clear, and it has bothered me somewhat on previous readings of Orthodoxy. Chesterton is not concerned here with whether or not Christianity is true. Or if he is, it is a very inductive argument - "isn't something so astonishing and so unique, and which fills human needs so well, very likely to be true?" The force is more to make you wish it were true than to convince you straightaway that it is. But the thought nags me: does all of this sound so convincing just because Chesterton is a gifted storyteller? Nietzsche, after all, was also a gifted storyteller who could spin a good yarn explaining Christianity.

Those are some of the questions chapter 1 has raised, and I'll be keeping them in mind. Chapters 2 and 3 next week!

[1] I don't recommend ever reading Hume at 2 am.