Sign in with FacebookClare Cannon's Reviews > Orthodoxy
Orthodoxy
by G.K. Chesterton
A complex work of great scope that I will need to read a few more times. Chesterton uses metaphors to explain the meaning of his theses, and the reader must work to comprehend what they signify on different levels. I find it amazing that this was first published in 1908. Its ideas refer to - but are so independent from - the philosophies of that time, as though it were written today looking back on them rather than their contemporary.
I'll not write a comprehensive review, but just wish to list some of the things that particularly impressed me on first reading. Chesterton asserts that the only fitting way for us to consider the world is with a sense of wonder. Thus the world of fairy-tales with its magic and mystery is closer to reality than the most naturalistic world described by science. I agree! I need to think about this some more.
Then rather than focusing on the limitations placed on us in the world, we should consider the greatness of the world that has been given to us - with this whole world at our disposal, is it not natural that there should be a limit, the very boundaries of which ensure that we can 'dance and play on the top of the hill without the worry of falling off the cliff' - boundaries which allow us to live most fully and without fear?
On another theme he asserts that the problem with contemporary literature is that it is often centred around extraordinary, strange protagonists who do even more strange things, and so the reader finds them uninteresting because they cannot relate to them. The classics, he counters, wrote about ordinary people who did extraordinary things, and so they are interesting and the reader can relate. The same thought had occurred to me when bored with a contemporary novel, why does the protagonist have to be so strange? And the contemporary stories I love I now realise are often based on an ordinary character who has the courage to do something extraordinary. This would be worth exploring further, an article perhaps.
And I loved the last chapters when he writes with wonder of the person of Jesus shown in the Gospels, a God who is not afraid to let his tears be seen, and sometimes his anger, and yet who has a certain shyness and reserve that gives him an intriguing, attractive depth. I've often thought the same.
And so many more ideas that I'll need to consider slowly...
by G.K. Chesterton
A complex work of great scope that I will need to read a few more times. Chesterton uses metaphors to explain the meaning of his theses, and the reader must work to comprehend what they signify on different levels. I find it amazing that this was first published in 1908. Its ideas refer to - but are so independent from - the philosophies of that time, as though it were written today looking back on them rather than their contemporary.
I'll not write a comprehensive review, but just wish to list some of the things that particularly impressed me on first reading. Chesterton asserts that the only fitting way for us to consider the world is with a sense of wonder. Thus the world of fairy-tales with its magic and mystery is closer to reality than the most naturalistic world described by science. I agree! I need to think about this some more.
Then rather than focusing on the limitations placed on us in the world, we should consider the greatness of the world that has been given to us - with this whole world at our disposal, is it not natural that there should be a limit, the very boundaries of which ensure that we can 'dance and play on the top of the hill without the worry of falling off the cliff' - boundaries which allow us to live most fully and without fear?
On another theme he asserts that the problem with contemporary literature is that it is often centred around extraordinary, strange protagonists who do even more strange things, and so the reader finds them uninteresting because they cannot relate to them. The classics, he counters, wrote about ordinary people who did extraordinary things, and so they are interesting and the reader can relate. The same thought had occurred to me when bored with a contemporary novel, why does the protagonist have to be so strange? And the contemporary stories I love I now realise are often based on an ordinary character who has the courage to do something extraordinary. This would be worth exploring further, an article perhaps.
And I loved the last chapters when he writes with wonder of the person of Jesus shown in the Gospels, a God who is not afraid to let his tears be seen, and sometimes his anger, and yet who has a certain shyness and reserve that gives him an intriguing, attractive depth. I've often thought the same.
And so many more ideas that I'll need to consider slowly...
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read Orthodoxy.
sign in »
Quotes Clare Liked
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“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 monotony that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten 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.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. . . . Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Reading Progress
| 02/02/2012 | page 85 |
|
51.0% | "wow!!!" 3 comments |
Comments (showing 1-10 of 10) (10 new)
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Ron
(new)
-
rated it 4 stars
Feb 03, 2012 08:45pm
Hi - I would love to talk to you about this book - I have mixed feelings about chesterton. My email is rlussier77@gmail.com
reply
|
flag
*
That's great Heidi, it's an incredible book. And happy to talk about it Ron, what did you think of it?
I like how you specifically described what you liked and found interesting in this book rather than describing the book. I am now interested in this book because of what you shared.
You're welcome Jennifer! There are so many amazing ideas in this book - I think the quotes that I've 'liked' add up to the whole book :)
Your review gave me a real taste of the book, and I like Chesterton, so it goes on my to-read list! Thanks!, it's right up my alley.
