Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton Outline and notes for Chapters 6 and 7 by Belinda Walker Roccaforte 2014

Orthodoxy

By: G.K. Chesterton

Chapter 6 Review: The Paradoxes of Christianity

Chapter 7 Review: The Eternal Revolution

I.               Introduction in Defense of Everything

II.              The Maniac

III.            The Suicide of Thought

IV.            The Ethics of Elfland

V.              The Flag of the World

VI.            The Paradoxes of Christianity

VII.          The Eternal Revolution

VIII.         The Romance of Orthodoxy

IX.            Authority and the Adventurer

Chapters 6 and 7

The paradoxes of Christianity

Because the truth of Christianity is a complex truth, it is hard to argue directly for it. The case for it is cumulative, and this makes it hard to know where to begin. C. says that the anti-Christian literature of his day provided the clue as to how to begin (see p. 91).

Examples:

a. Christianity is too pessimistic: spreads gloom, keeps people from taking joy in nature, in their bodies, in their own autonomy, etc.
BUT Christianity is also too optimistic: consists in wishful thinking with its doctrines of Providence and life after death.

"This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it" (p. 92).

b. Christianity makes one too timid: emphasis on virtues like kindness, non-violence, monkishness
BUT Christianity also makes one too warlike: crusades, mother of wars.

"The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep ... [But] I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned upside down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much" (p. 93).

c. Christianity is just one among other religions; as a creed it divides people but as a moral code it is universal
BUT Christianity preaches a benighted and outmoded morality.

"I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideas. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstition of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark" (p. 94).

d. Christianity attacks the family by dragging women to the cloister
BUT Christianity forces marriage and the family upon us.

e. Christianity shows contempt for women's intellect
BUT Christianity is such that in Europe "only women" follow it.

f. Christianity is reproachable because of its pomp and ritualism
BUT Christianity is reproachable because of its sackcloth and dried peas.

g. Christianity restrains sexuality too much
BUT Christianity does not restrain sexuality enough.

h. Christianity is primly respectable
BUT Christianity is religiously extravagant.

i. Christianity is too disunified
BUT Christianity is too monolithic.

C's conclusion at that point was not that Christianity is true, but simply that it must be very odd to be wrong in all these ways at once. There are just two possibilities: either Christianity is a very odd shape or the critics themselves are odd in many opposed ways. (p. 97).