Orthodoxy

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1908

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-9

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “The Flag of the World”

Content Warning: This section discusses suicide as both a reality and a metaphor and refers to the author’s stigmatizing language regarding suicide.

After the discussion on ethics, the question of loyalty and devotion comes into play regarding the individual’s place in the world. The irony of human existence is that human beings are born into various loyalties even before they have a chance to be personally devoted to these loyalties. Chesterton holds the opinion that one’s attitude should be expressed in a devout, unquestioning fashion: “Our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval” (99). He doesn’t equate this to blind loyalty but to the kind that exists beyond simple critique. When it comes to the question of loyalty to the world, he describes two kinds of people who make understandable, yet regrettable, mistakes.

First, there is the optimist. The optimist looks at their country with rose-tinted glasses, seeing only the positive. Second, there is the pessimist, who, by contrast, can see nothing good about their place. These two errors exist, however, because the person has misconceptions about the nature of goodness and how it is attained. The true order is in fact the reverse, says Chesterton: “People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her” (100-01). Love was the cause of the subsequent greatness, not a response to some greatness that pre-existed the critic. The realist is able to see the good and the bad at the same time, and it is their clear-sightedness that allows for both love and reform.

In some cases, there is a type of person who pretends to practice realism or love of country but in truth does nothing of the sort. Chesterton says that this person is an “anti-patriot” who “is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, ‘I am sorry to say we are ruined,’ and is not sorry at all” (102). Though they try to appear aligned with the optimist and the pessimist, they share almost nothing in common with either. The quality they do share is with the pessimist, who lacks devotion. Their pessimism does not come from a desire to improve things, but rather simply to criticize: “The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises” (103). Only love can bring about genuine reform. The author compares this to the romantic love a woman has for a man. Someone who loves another for who they are attempts to help them grow into something better, instead of criticizing their faults for the sake of negativity.

On a more serious note, the loyalty one has toward the world—and to one’s own self—is thrown in stark relief when put in dialogue with the question of suicide. Chesterton writes, “Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life” (106). He claims that the act of taking one’s own life is a refusal to engage with the world and is a betrayal not just of one’s self but of the cosmos as a whole. Many have criticized the Christian teaching on suicide on account of its long-standing praise of martyrdom, but from the Christian perspective, the two acts are diametrically opposed even if they look to the outsider like similar, or related, acts.

Martyrdom is an act of self-sacrifice, an act that expresses an inherent dedication to the world: “A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life” (107). Chesterton says that death for the Christian is a terror to be confronted while at the same time being a mere doorway to a higher life in heaven. Rather than looking within the self, or to the world around, the Christian looks up to the things beyond themselves.

Chapter 6 Summary: “The Paradoxes of Christianity”

Discovering that Christianity had been the “key that fits” (115), providing answers to all the questions that he had long been pondering, Chesterton proceeds to discuss the manner in which Christianity handles the mystery and paradox of life. Life is “nearly reasonable, but not quite”; it is logical and yet is at the same time “a trap for logicians” (121). All the time that he had been viewing Christianity from the outside, it had appeared to be quite strange, never quite adding up; from within, however, the answer seemed clear.

Chesterton says that faith is often mistakenly assumed to not be a rational or scientific thing, and therefore it must be relatively simple. Following upon this assumption, then, is the idea that if faith is simple, then it must be easily understood; when it is not understood, the only response is that the faith must therefore be illogical, irrational, and contradictory. The problem is not the chain of logic but the very first assumption, as the Christian faith is far from simple. Chesterton offers a metaphor for its complexity using the image of a lock and key: “A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key” (123). The world and the problems it poses are complex, as are the answers that Christianity provides. If the answers fit the problem in this scenario, they are likely to be the right ones.

In the years leading up to his intellectual conversion to the Christian faith, Chesterton encountered many agnostic and skeptical figures who presented Christianity as an entity brimming with complexity and contradictions. At first, Christianity seemed to be too optimistic and too pessimistic at the same time. From all sides, the accusations against the Christian Church seemed to pile up against one another in contradictory ways. “I simply deduced,” the author states, “that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out” (128). The paradoxes continue: Christianity is accused of being both pacifist and warmongering, of being obsessed with sex and virginity, and of praising the poor yet building magnificently beautiful churches and cathedrals.

This cacophony of contradiction first appears monstrous, but when approached from a different perspective, Chesterton found that it made a lot of sense to him; he writes, “Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways” (134). Christianity is the thing that balances all other things; it holds opposites together and unites them as the center of it all. Even historically and politically, he views Christianity as having united the whole of Europe into a singular body, even in light of the magnificent differences between nations, cultures, and customs. The unity provided by Christian orthodoxy is far from the obvious result, but it is an undeniable result, nonetheless.

Chapters 5-6 Analysis

Chapter 5 expounds on the irony of being loyal while simultaneously being its biggest critic and that love is the true drive of reform. Often when people speak of revolutions, for instance, there is an understanding that a revolution is necessary because of some kind of evil, wrongdoing, or systematic injustice that needs to be remedied and transformed. In too many cases, the assumption is that the reason one would desire a reform or revolution is because one hates what they want reformed. Conventional wisdom would say that if you don't like something, then change it.

This is true to a certain extent, as Chesterton lays out, but he notes that the more important thing is that the only true revolution must begin with love. Turning the destructive and violent idea of revolution on its head, Chesterton emphasizes the concept of reform, which means to change a thing’s shape. In the case of a revolution, one is changing the shape of a thing—typically a political regime—in order to make it better. It is this desire for good that proves that any desire for reform is based on love, as there is something that is loved and desired, and the revolution occurs because that good, loved thing is being withheld for some reason.

In comparing the two figures of the optimist and the pessimist, their equal and opposite errors are made clear. The optimist will see only the good and will therefore ignore the truth when things aren’t going well. The pessimist will see only the bad and will therefore miss the fact that what they are criticizing is an object that demands their affection. The realist, on the other hand—which is what Chesterton means when he speaks of the genuine patriot, for instance—sees their country as so worthy of love and devotion that they are willing to suffer in order to change it for the better or to right any wrongs that have been perpetrated in its name.

This is the logic behind the ideology of the martyr and The Christian Attitude Toward Death, the image of which is Chesterton’s true goal in this thought experiment. The martyr may seem initially as though they are pessimists, throwing away the world for the sake of a personal opinion. However, this is the opposite of the case. The martyr is so in love with life that they are willing to sacrifice everything for the truth. It is the martyr who is the ultimate lover since they are willing to give up their life for what they care for the most. The martyr, leading straight into the next chapter, is also the perfect symbol for the various paradoxes that make up the heart of Christian teaching.

Chesterton views Christianity as a Synthesis of Paradoxes and Contradictions and lays out the fact that it is not simply the Christian Church that teaches things that seem paradoxical or contradictory. He demonstrates that this goes all the way back to the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. Reading the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth at times appears to be a man of paradox. He tells his disciples to sell what they have to buy swords and yet also tells them they must turn the other cheek if they are struck. He teaches that they are to call no man rabbi and yet never rebukes them when they use the word for him. He teaches that it is almost impossible for the rich to enter heaven and yet praises Mary Magdalene for spending a year’s wages buying perfume with which to anoint him.

Taking all these paradoxes (and many more) into consideration, Chesterton makes the point that one must come to one of two conclusions. Either Christianity is contradictory and full of internal tensions and conflicts, or Christian teaching holds various positions in tension with one another so as to not destroy the complexity and mystery of the human experience. Chesterton is convinced that Christianity is the only means by which the paradox of the human experience can be retained and celebrated and that it is the critics who do not understand what they are talking about when they call out the religion’s contradictions.

Using the image of a circle, he points out that one could easily object that various points around a circle could be said to have nothing in common with one another when viewed in isolation. However, when viewed from the center, one sees how they are connected in the uniting shape of the circle. This, he says, is what it is like to view the paradoxes of Christianity: When viewed in isolation, they can seem nonsensical, but this was never how they were meant to be viewed.