All I knew of Chesterton before reading Orthodoxy was that he was the source of a number of pithy quotes.
For instance, one of my favorites: "Going to church no more makes you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car."
After reading Orthodoxy, it is clear to me that Chesterton was brilliant. He cuts masterfully through truisms and arguments of the time pointing out time and again how people don't really mean what they are saying, or what they are saying is not really what they mean. Unfortunately, Orthodoxy as a work does not live up to Chesterton's genius. Chesterton himself calls the book "chaotic." Of course, there is some authenticity in this chaos. Orthodoxy is an intellectual autobiography of sorts tracing Chesterton's shift from agnosticism to Christianity. He discovered, to his surprise, that they mysteries and functionings of the world were explained not by any of the modern heresies but rather by the seemingly antiquated Orthodoxy. His argument is not always coherent and at times makes one desire for more nuance, but we most take it for what it is. Orthodoxy is not a work of apologetics, but rather an outpouring of all Chesterton's thoughts on the modern world and Christianity. The book as a whole probably will not change your life, but oh how some the selections will make you think!
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"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion... to accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
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"Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand."
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"there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck."
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"what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening. No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?"
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"[Christianity] not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple about simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth."
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"Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission... One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul."
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"The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild."
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"People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace and statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse..."
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To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. but in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For the orthodox ther can always be a revolution; for a revolution is restoration. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no many has seen since Adam."
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"The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rirch are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable."
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"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."
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"Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only afterwards that we realise that jumping was an athletic exercise highly beneficial to our health. it is only afterwards that we realise danger is the root of all drama and romance. The strongest argument for divine grace is simply its ungraciousness."
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