At the crossroads of modernity and faith: some thoughts on G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy
Both Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 24, 1900) and
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 - 1936) sought to craft a life-affirming
philosophy in a world that had witnessed the “death of God”, which was also –
as Nietzsche realized – the “death of man” (hitherto understood)[1]. Whereas
Nietzsche refused to avail himself of any metaphysics and chose rather to
construct a philosophy within the confines of the phenomenal world (for him,
the only world), Chesterton found Christian orthodoxy to be the best answer to
modern pessimism.
Nietzsche and
Chesterton both grew up in an atmosphere of “tolerant
orthodoxy”. The son of a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche was quite
pious as a child, but abandoned his Christian convictions while at boarding
school (he graduated at the age of 19).[2] For
his part, Chesterton had become an agnostic by the age of 16. As
teenagers, both Nietzsche and Chesterton had reached a crossroads concerning
their Christian faith. While Nietzsche would go on to make a career
waging intellectual war on Christianity[3],
Chesterton would eventually come full circle and stumble into orthodoxy again
(for the first time).[4]
For both Nietzsche
and Chesterton, when it comes to philosophizing, nothing less is at stake than
the (in)sanity of the world. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche
uncovers the Christian conspiracy:
“…to make sick
is the true, secret purpose of the whole system of redemptive procedures
constructed by the church. And the church itself—is it not the catholic
madhouse as the ultimate ideal? The earth altogether as a madhouse?”[5]
In the two opening chapters of his 1908 work Orthodoxy[6],
Chesterton describes his dissatisfaction with modern thought, and clearly has
Nietzsche (among others) in his sights: “they are all on the road to the
emptiness of the asylum”.[7] Regarding
Nietzsche’s 1889 collapse into insanity, Chesterton remarks that “The softening
of the brain[8] which
ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident…Thinking in isolation and
with pride ends in being an idiot”.[9] In
his Autobiography, Chesterton describes the circumstances which
eventually led him to affirm life in the teeth of a predominant, morbid
pessimism:[10]
“When I had been for some time in …the darkest
depths of the contemporary pessimism, I had a strong inward impulse to
revolt…I invented a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own…:
that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary
enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with
nothing…The mere fact that one could wave one’s arms and legs about…At the back
of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment
at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life
was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting
in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy…when
I did begin to write, I was full of a new and fiery resolution to write
against the Decadents[11] and
the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age…”[12]
As mentioned above, Chesterton's 1908 work Orthodoxy strikes
me as having a primarily practical purpose (please indulge my
Chestertonian-style alliteration). With this book, Chesterton
proposes to meet a double spiritual need – that paradoxical mixture of the
familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has named
“romance”. Chesterton insists that we need so to view the world as
to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. Chesterton
self-deprecatingly admits that he set out to create a new religion for himself,
only to discover that he had simply re-invented “the wheel”, i.e. orthodox,
historic Christianity. “Orthodoxy” in this work refers to the
Apostle’s Creed, which, Chesterton claims, is “the best root of energy and
sound ethics”. Chesterton does not proffer an exposition of the
Creed or an historical analysis of its origins – rather, he offers an account
of how the faith summarized in the Creed provided him with
what he considers to be the best possible worldview. I.e., Christianity
taught Chesterton how to live, how to rejoice as an inhabitant of our
paradoxical world. Quite simply, it made him who he is.
It
was Chesterton’s dissatisfaction with his encounter with modern thought as a
university student that set him on the path towards orthodoxy. As
the argument of the book gets underway, Chesterton launches an attack against
the fundamentally reductionistic approach to reality common to most modern
thinkers. For Chesterton, to reason without reference to a
transcendent standard of truth (beauty, goodness; what Chesterton calls “first
principles”) was tantamount to insanity. Chesterton affirms that if
we would only acknowledge the irreducible mystery at the heart of reality, we
could understand everything else in light of it (cf. C.S. Lewis’ quip, “I
believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not only because I
see it, but because by it I can see everything else.”). After
describing the rational and logical proclivities of the insane (i.e. using only
their reason to account for everything), Chesterton then applies this analysis
to (philosophical) materialism and skepticism. However, Chesterton
continues, insane though it is, modern thought is not content to reject
mystery/ transcendence (i.e. God) in the name of reason. Indeed,
modern thought has trained its sights on reason itself, on the very capacity to
think. Chesterton insists that both religion and reason are matters
of faith; it is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation
to reality at all. After a survey of a catalogue of modern
philosophies, Chesterton comes to the conclusion that modern thought has run
its course, that all the questions have been found, but none of the answers.
It’s
interesting to note how “free thought”, on Chesterton’s reading, seems to have
anticipated postmodernism’s deconstruction of “truth”. In chapter
2, Chesterton goes on to explain how Nietzsche’s insistence on “will” is
nonsensical in so far as “will” as a principle is worthless;
everyone wills, yes, but everyone wills something. It is
the choice of that thing that matters; our choices reflect our
belief that what we choose merits being chosen over and above everything
else. So, Chesterton insists, the point is not that we
choose (a tautology); the point is what we
choose. To take Chesterton’s image: Nietzsche stands at a crossroads
and strongly believes that all the roads are worthy of being
taken. So, as Chesterton sardonically concludes, Nietzsche stands at
the crossroads. However, one cannot stand still forever; one must
undertake the journey of life. For Chesterton, orthodoxy gave him the
"energy" and vision necessary to boldly choose his path, the path of
Christian faith.
[1] Nietzsche was fascinated by the consequences
of secularism in the modern West and the subsequent undermining of traditional
moral values and sought to create a philosophy which would enable people to
lead a meaningful existence in the wake of God’s “death”. For
Nietzsche, the thought of Darwin had caused the “death of man”, which
necessitated a new (a)moral framework if life was to retain any meaning;
cf. Hollingdale, R.J. Nietzsche: The Man
and his Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1965],
pp. 72-73; see also Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Joyous Science (trans.
and ed. By R. Kevin Hill), UK: Penguin Random House, 2018 [1882], p. 225.
[2] Cf.
Hollingdale, R.J. Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy, op.
cit., pp. 7-27. Hollingdale is of the opinion that Nietzsche’s
abandonment of his belief in Christianity was not a reaction against a strict
upbringing, insisting that the climate in the Nietzsche parsonage was one of
tolerant orthodoxy: Ibid., pp. 3-4. Maisie Ward notes
that Chesterton’s parents seemed to reflect the increasingly liberal and
tolerant approach to religion (Christianity) typical of their generation and
seemed to have adopted a very nominal religious practice: Ward, Maisie, Gilbert
Keith Chesterton, Alpha Editions, 2021 [1943], p. 10. Around the
age that Nietzsche irrevocably rejected his faith, Chesterton was busy
intuiting his way towards orthodoxy: Ibid., pp. 45-52 although by
his own admission (in Orthodoxy), Chesterton had been “a pagan at
the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen”: idem., The Three Apologies of G.K.
Chesterton: Heretics, Orthodoxy & The Everlasting Man, Mockingbird
Press, 2018, p. 169.
[3] “What [Nietzsche] flung himself against, from
beginning to end of his days of writing, was always, in the last analysis,
Christianity in some form or other – Christianity as a system of practical
ethics, Christianity as a political code, Christianity as metaphysics, Christianity
as a gauge of the truth. It would be difficult to think of any
intellectual enterprise on his long list that did not, more or less directly
and clearly, relate itself to this master enterprise of them all”: H.L.
Mencken, “Introduction” to The Antichrist (1918): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm#INTRODUCTION (accessed January 10,
2023).
[4] Cf. Chesterton,
G.K. The Three Apologies of G.K. Chesterton, op. cit., pp. 117-19.
[5] Kaufmann, Walter,
ed. The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Penguin Books, 1976 [1954,
1959], p. 632 (emphasis original); The Antichrist was
published in 1895, due to Nietzsche having gone insane in January 1889.
[6] “The Maniac” &
“The Suicide of Thought”.
[7] Chesterton, G.K. The Three Apologies of G.K.
Chesterton, op. cit., p. 139.
[8] “Softening of the
brain”, understood to be some kind of nervous or brain affliction, but not
insanity, was how Nietzsche’s mother described the cause of the death of her
husband in 1849 at the age of 36 and when Friedrich was 4 years of
age. As to the causes of Nietzsche’s own insanity (which lasted from
1889 to his death in 1900), the evidence is ambiguous at best. The
popular theory that Nietzsche went insane due to having contracted syphilis is
largely unsubstantiated: Hollingdale, R.J. Nietzsche:
The Man and his Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 8-12,
30-31. Chesterton’s remarks at this point seem unnecessarily
flippant; then again, he did not have the advantage of a century of Nietzsche
studies to rely on in forming his opinions.
[9] Chesterton,
G.K. The Three Apologies of G.K. Chesterton, op. cit., p.
139.
[10] Chesterton recorded
in a notebook dated to 1894: “Show me a person who has plenty of worries and
troubles and I will show you a person who, whatever he is, is not a
pessimist”. Maisie Ward makes reference to “the one hatred of G.K.’s
life: his loathing of pessimism”: Ward, Maisie, Gilbert Keith
Chesterton, op. cit., pp. 46, 53.
[11] Cf. Nietzsche’s
understanding of the decadent life as one in which pain and suffering
predominate over joy. For Nietzsche, the healthy life was a joyful
life: Hollingdale, op. cit., p. 78. Cf.
also Nietzsche’s remarks in Ecce Homo: idem., On
the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo, op. cit., pp.
224-25.
[12] The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton, San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006 [1936], pp. 98-100 (emphasis added).
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