Introduction To G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy - Dale Ahlquist

all right well welcome to the Hollywood Chesterton society I just love saying that Hollywood Chesterton society Hollywood Chesterton society you are discussing the book orthodoxy I'm going to talk a little bit about chapter three type but but since you've already started orthodoxy there's no reason why I can't introduce the book again right yeah it is it is truly one of the pillars of Chesterton's writings it's such an essential book of Chesterton's to read it is the the trunk from which all the branches of Chesterton grow because every other book you read somehow comes back to this book and it's it's his interesting description of how he became a Christian but what happens especially for people who decide to start reading cheston with this book they have the odd experience of underlining an entire book and and then not having any idea what it was they just read there's the story that Chesterton tells about the woman who goes to see Hamlet and when she's walking out of the play afterwards she says well it was nothing but quotations and that's the problem with orthodoxy it seems like it's nothing but quotations it's sort of Chester's greatest quotations come from from this book but so that's the first problem is you read it you underline the entire book and you have no idea what it was you just read so you go back and you reread the book that's when things get a little wonky because you've obviously read this book before you have the evidence you can see that you've underlined it and yet somebody has gone in there and rewritten the book since the first time you read it so you're reading an entirely different book the second time you read it so that that throws you off too but then the third time when you come into it with a different colored pen or a different color highlighter then it starts to gel it starts to come together you you you're able to work past all the show-stopping quotations and starting to see his arguments gel and come together and what it is he's trying to do because he he says that it's not really a work of apologetics even though it is because he's he's explaining how how he's able to defend the faith in a way that is absolutely reasonable and and and can work as as reasonable arguments but it's it's his own when he calls his own slovenly autobiography his elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious he calls it and and Chris he starts with that wonderful parable of the guy who leaves England hoping to discover a a foreign country his boat gets turned around and he comes back to England thinking he's in this foreign country and plants the flag and it's looking around at all these things that he's seen before as if he's seeing them for the first time and has a new perspective on the whole world well that's what happened to Chester and himself he he thought he was going to go out and start this new faith that the perfect heresy he said and when he put the finishing touches on it it turned out to be orthodoxy it turned out that someone had come up with this religion about nineteen hundred years before he came up with it and and the the other interesting thing about his whole approach to Christianity is that he did not come to the faith from reading great defenses of Christianity and great Christian treatises he came to Christianity by reading the attacks on Christianity and it turned out that they didn't make sense and and so what what happens in this book is he started here what is it about this this thing that everyone hates it so much that they will contradict themselves and trip over themselves in order to attack it and they attack it from all sides maybe that is the thing that is saying in the central thing and everything else is off and as a matter of fact the second chapter it which is called the maniac is about how the modern philosophies all lead to insanity if you take any of them to their logical conclusions and he says they're all stuck on one idea is that they're all stuck in the clean well-lit prison of one idea it's a great line and of course he what you get of course a great taste of a fee stuff in this book is cheston's use of paradox and paradox is really the essential element of Chesterton's writings and if you if you understand that you can get all of Chesterton there's two definitions of paradox one is it is the truth that is the opposite of the truth we expect that's literally what it means paradox means contrary to the accepted received truth and the truth that is surprising or shocking and that goes against expectations but then there's this derivative meaning which is the two two truths that are both true but they seem to contradict each other and of course the other the other thing you can read besides chester that is full of paradox is that book that has lines in it like the first she'll be last and the last shall be first and a virgin shall give birth and the dead shall rise and the greatest among you must be your servant and blessed are the poor and blessed are those who mourn and counted all joy when you meet various trials all of those truths go against expectations so Chesterton nah is is rich with the paradox and he explains it great in that chapter two which is the ordinary man has always cared more for true than for consistency if he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them his spiritual sight is stereoscopic just like his physical sight he sees two different pictures at once but he sees all the better for that thus he's always believed that there's such a thing as fate and such a thing as free will also there's he's always believed that children are indeed the Kingdom of Heaven but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of Earth he admired youth because it was young and aged because it was not it's exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man the whole secret of mysticism is this that a man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand he'll get of course later on in the book to that what is that that ultimate contradiction it's going to be the cross of course and and in Christ who was fully God and fully man that comes later he's got one other chapter which is the main one we're going to talk about tonight in the suicide of thought where he also just absolutely derails modern philosophy so he says these first two chapters are the unpleasant part of the book because he's really going after bonner philosophy then he starts to construct a very positive philosophy issue which you'll start in on the next session with the ethics of Elfland the great chapter in the book but the suicide of thought you might recall that in in chapter 2 he has that amazingly paradoxical line he says the madman is not the man who's lost his reason the mad man's the man who's lost everything but his reason that you need in order to have sanity if you have something else besides reason alone and Chesterton calls it the creative imagination well in the suicide of thought he basically takes the opposite tack he says that the creative imagination alone is not enough either you got to have reason to balance it because he says he looks at all of the great modern writings and he calls them a pile of ingenuity and a pile of futility so the ingenuity is the creative imagination but but it's futile because it's not connected to anything that is complete or balanced and again if you take any of these ideas to their logical conclusion they'd not only to madness as he talks about in in Chapter two it leads to suicidal madness it leads to self-destruction and all of the bad modern ideas do that they end up destroying themselves I think of the think of the bad things out there today the things that the church has been warring against for the the last generation and now most recently abortions got to be the most self-destructive thing there is same-sex marriage is self-destructive it's barren it doesn't produce anything it leads to a dead end and Chester says that's the way is with all the modern books the modern art the modern ideas they all sound clever they all may have a creative edge to them they may seem to be imaginative but they're ultimately bankrupt and then it's beginning at the beginning of this chapter he has a line that I quote every day every day this quote comes up and it's coming up right now he says when a system when a society breaks apart he says two things happen the vices run wild and they do great damage but the virtues also run wild and the virtues do even greater damage because the virtues become isolated from each other and are wandering alone and they end up doing war with each other when you don't have a complete and coherent social system defined by a strong religious foundation the virtues do war with each other and thus you'll have people who care only about truth and you'll have people who care only about pity but the people who care only about truth their truth is pitiless and the people who care only about pity their pity is untruthful it's a very eloquent description of the dichotomy between the right and the left a truth that is pitiless and a pity that is untruthful doing war with each other you have to have the truth but you have to have the charity to go with it you just as the Apostle Paul says speaking the truth in love if we don't we cannot compromise the truth but we neither can we compromise the love it's one of those paradoxical balances that has to be kept Chesterton's asks us what the chief pleasure is in this in this chapter well it's it's being able to enjoy God's creation but what do we need in order to enjoy anything we need humility it's it things seem bigger when we are smaller and Chesterton is really the great master of humility he's such a he's such a humble writer has such a wonderful approach everything that's why he has the sense of enjoyment of everything he sees that if we tried to do destroy the idea of a divine authority what happens is that we lose all idea of human authority with it unless we recognize divine authority we there's no human Authority he says you can't he starts to attack the modern cult of progress in this chapter he does that throughout his writings progress it becomes a word that you know is it end in itself you know I believe in progress well you can't you can't have progress unless you define what your goal is and then you can say whether or not you're progressing towards it but progress is not an end in itself you can't have improvement unless you have a standard that doesn't change and then you'll know if you're improving towards the standard Chesterton says the modern world keeps changing the standard so we don't know if we're improving at all because we keep changing what our ideals are and then he attacks a free thought which is the early term for relativism I guess free thought they just it was an inability to believe anything to inability to come to any conclusions to admire mere choice rather than just choosing anything he says to admire mere choices to refuse to decide and then he really goes after it this yet because he says every act is an act of self-sacrifice because when you choose anything you reject everything else and you have to give up something anytime you make a choice every act of the will he says is an act of self limitation so so the idea of having a conviction in choosing something and deciding on the truth does mean you have to give up something and but that's the only idea that's the only way you can have any sanity is to reach conclusions it goes back to something he says in heretic so this is where you know God has not only given us a mouth to ask questions with but also to answer them and and we can't have sanity unless there is an objective truth and so that is very much an attack on relativistic thinking you cannot have sanity unless there is an objective truth and then he goes after the skeptics themselves because he says how he points out how the skeptics are inconsistent and they don't even play by their own rules and when they exercise their doubt he says the new rebel is a skeptic who will not allow himself to believe anything but that precludes him from being a credible critic of anything all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind and the modern revolutionary doubts not only the institution he denounces but he announces the doctrine by vici denounces it so you have to you have to stand on something in order to exercise your doubts and so that means you've accepted something Chesterton says the real skeptic falls through floor after floor of a bottomless universe you have to start by believing something even in order to doubt but modern skepticism tries to begin with doubting and that doesn't ever accomplish anything and so it ends in it ends in the same place insanity ends mental helplessness self-destructive that's really the essence of that chapter and when Chester gets to the end of it he feels exhausted because you know he's just destroyed all modern thinking and and he says it's an unpleasant task but now now we're going to do something positive and then he'll start to build it up with this amazing chapter the ethics of Elfland which you all have to read for next time I won't be here but I'll tell you that's one of the the essential chapters in the book and how he learns the basic truths of Christianity before he knows anything about Christianity he learns them in the nursery and in the fairy tales which are rich with paradox so that's the suicide of thought and Chesterton really you know has established himself with this book as as a thinker to be reckoned with in in the 20th century and there's a good story of a guy who man who wrote his PhD dissertation in in philosophy and in the 1930s went to Chesterton and asked because he wanted to get his book his dissertation published as a book and and he asked Chesterton if if he would write the introduction to the book and Chesterton said well I don't know anything about philosophy and this young PhD students in law are you kidding your book orthodoxy is one of the most important works of philosophy of our generation you know thousands of us have depended on this book and Chesterton you know so well up we're both Catholic I guess we think the same way so I'll write the introduction to your book and so he wrote the introduction to the first book ever written by Fulton sheen I was Fulton sheen and told Sheen said later that the writer who influenced him the most was GK Chesterton and he even attended Chesterton funeral was there so so yeah very very interesting story but it shows how important orthodoxy was to default and she and how important Chesterton was default is she well okay that's that's it now I'd be willing to take any questions on orthodoxy or on anything else how about since uh ethics of Elfland is my favorite chapter in the book and you I just give us a little maybe a little broader quick review of just what's in that chapter and a trailer for next month's uh he he talks about the I mentioned the fairy tales but but the first thing that comes out is how he gives this great defense of democracy it's one of the most eloquent defenses of democracy you'll ever read Chesterton absolutely believes in democracy which is why I'm so sad that Charles isn't here tonight but yeah and but because Chester always believes in in the virtues of common sense and the common man and people being able to do things for themselves and being allowed to do things for the selves and we trust people to do things for themselves and and he doesn't understand why people who also believe in democracy somehow seem so opposed to tradition and and why there's this this war between those who are believed in democracy and those who believe in tradition he says because really those two things are connected and his tradition simply means giving a vote to the largest and most you know the most unrepresented group right now our ancestors tradition is the democracy of the dead and and he says and what so it means actually letting those who have come before us have a say and listening to their voice as well as the voice of those who merely happen to be walking about and and one of the ways we hear the voice of those who come before us is the stories that they've passed on and the most basic stories that they've given to us are the ones we learn in the nursery and those fairy tales that are repeated over and over again because they each contain basic truths and all the great Christian truths come out in the in the fairy tales and and of course the paradox is to that the paradox of humility is in Cinderella that the humble will be exalted and the paradox of courage is in Jack the giant-killer that you have to be afraid in order to be brave and then the great paradoxes of love is in Beauty and the Beast that you have to love a thing first and then make it loveable afterwards and and so what's the establishes the fairy - and then he starts calling that this world of fairy tales elf land and there's there's that there's something magic that happens in elf land and this is we're here to sit down read because it he talks about how science works and what a scientific law is in a scientific law does not does not mean some what we call scientific law is watching the same thing happen over and over again but that's not really a law because we can imagine that being broken right or maybe it is the definition of law is that it can be broken we can picture you know an apple falling from a tree but we can also picture the Apple not falling and that would be the breaking the scientific law so what we call scientific law is simply a repeated action that we've observed over and over again what can't be broken is is is the true logic of two plus two is always going to equal four we can never imagine two plus two not equaling four and an elf land the same thing works two plus two equals four in elf land but the Apple may not fall from the tree sometimes and it and the carriage may turn into a pumpkin you know in and there's certain magical things that happen and but there's still rules that have to be followed and the rules that are followed in elf land are the rules in order to be happy you have to follow the rules in order to be happy it's called the doctrine of conditional joy and if you obey the rules you will be happy if you don't obey the rules things will go badly and go terribly wrong and yes the you must be home by midnight or the carriage will turn into a pumpkin you must not look at the prints or the castle will fall you must not eat the Apple or death will come into the world and and so he sees that these things are always true and that and I've gone about about a half way into it so there you go you

Channel: Hollywood Chesterton Society

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Keywords: Dale Ahlquist, Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Hollywood (City/Town/Village)

Id: 2i7wIJComxA

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 17 2013