Reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (1908) after C. S. Lewis’s The Reading Life is like stepping from a warm room into colder air. Where Lewis invites, Chesterton confronts. Both are Christians writing about the insufficiency of materialism, but where Lewis gently suggests you might find the door open, Chesterton kicks it in and laughs about it.
“Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.” If our thoughts are nothing but animal processes, we have no reason to trust them, including the thought that we are nothing but animals. Reason, pushed to its logical conclusion about its own nature, commits suicide. Lewis would develop this more carefully in Miracles decades later, but Chesterton gets there in a sentence and a half, with more swagger.
He is brilliant, but his bias frequently makes him overreach. He presents a false choice between materialism and orthodoxy, as though the only alternative to a dead universe is the Apostles’ Creed. He is unfair to Marcus Aurelius, whom he dismisses as an egoist believing only in his inward light: this is not the man who wrote the Meditations, a book devoted not to the admiration of the inner self but to the constant correction of it. I nevertheless forgive the unfairness as I like his swagger, his willingness to be unfair in service of a larger truth. Chesterton writes as though the fate of the world depends on whether you find the sunrise astonishing this morning; Lewis writes as though it would be nice if you did.
The middle chapters of Orthodoxy repeat the same move more times than they need to. The first three chapters, though, are as good as anything in English apologetics, and the bewildered ape stays in the mind like a small, sharp stone in the shoe.
It is always worth following his thinking even when his swagger makes him overreach, because occasionally you get the Chesterton who earns forgiveness for every unfairness in the book:
Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One ‘settles down’ into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man ‘falls’ into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.
The whole passage to get to five words that do the work of a theological treatise.