Orthodoxy
Reticence generally prevails when it comes my personal life and my beliefs. You may have already read of my heartfelt adoration for The Prisoner and thus gleaned my tendencies toward privacy in light of an ever-expanding government with increasing power. This website is reserved mostly for writings concerning my creative endeavors or my appreciation for others’ creative endeavors, but I’ll officially come clean in this post: I am a Catholic.
When I say I’m a Catholic, I don’t mean it in the same sense in which I usually hear: “I grew up Catholic.” I don’t mean it in the cultural sense like saying I used to live in New York and am thus a “New Yorker.” Rather, I mean that I’m a committed Catholic who attends church weekly and donates my time and money to the cause. I am a Catholic Christian. I cannot say that I wholeheartedly agree (yet?) with everything the Catholic Church says, but I’m probably closer to it than a lot of people.
I must also say that I’m an inquisitive thinker, although a more suitable analogy might liken me to an avid sports fan as opposed to the person on the team playing the sport. Oftentimes, I am considering answers to the big questions of life: Why are we here? How did the universe begin? Is there a God? etcetera. This “intellectual” side of me is in constant battle with the “religious” side of me, especially since I’m more of an interested observer in the intellectual discussions as opposed to being an active participant.
Hugh Ross, an actual intellectual, has written several books about theistic evolution and the Big Bang as it relates to the creation story of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. He has stated that Christians should have no fear in modern scientific discovery because nothing will be discovered that will disprove the existence of God. If anything, it will answer the “how” and will never clear up the “why.” The “religious” side of me agrees with that.
Stephen Hawking, another actual intellectual, has a significantly larger following and is now using his general unifying theories of the universe to distribute a message of philosophy stating that there is no God, not unlike some Trojan horse. Richard Dawkins, another incredibly smart guy who gets way more press than Hugh Ross, is a vehement atheist. The “intellectual” side of me hears what those guys are saying and finds it hard to disagree with their arguments against the irrationality of religion and using a god to fill in the gaps of our current knowledge of the universe.
There are other very smart Christian guys, like John Lennox and John Haldane, who are highly-respected intellectuals that have publicly debated Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and other vocal atheists regarding the existence of God. I’m glad these Christian intellectuals are out there fighting this fight, if anything to offer a counterpoint to the vehement atheism of Dawkins and the like. Competition is to the marketplace as peer review or devil’s advocacy are to the think space. It would be disingenuous of me to say that Lennox/Haldane are on equal footing (in terms of buy-in from the broader scientific community) with Dawkins/Hitchens considering the disparity of credence lent to them in the mainstream scientific media. Rather, they are generally made to look rather foolish standing in the shadows of these intellectual giants.
When the two sides of me (the “religious” and “intellectual” sides, or better: the metaphysical and physical sides) argue, I face nightly small-scale existential crises. Thoughts of death and the afterlife, the surrealism of it all, the reality of it all, the inevitable consequence of living, and my own love of self run rampant, bouncing around my skull like never-ending fireworks. And it all just terrifies me. It’s the scariest stuff I can think of because it’s rooted in the fear of the unknown and knowing that death is an experience everyone must face alone. It is said that public speaking is the biggest fear for most people, but I have no problems with public speaking. It’s the fear of whatever happens after dying that literally keeps me up at night.
Thankfully, I started reading G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy recently (for the umpteenth time), which always allays my fears and not for reasons you’d probably assume. Chesterton doesn’t prove anything about the afterlife one way or the other–although he makes a great case for Catholicism in the book. Rather, he proves that the lives and worldviews of avid skeptics and atheists can be, well… boring.
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
That! That is the pattern that has been keeping me up at night. It’s this notion of understanding that which cannot be understood. The universe is infinitely large. It’s foolish of me to think that I can comprehend it, but it’s easy to believe that I’m capable of comprehending it in this day and age. There’s even a TV series on Netflix called How the Universe Works. All I need to do is watch a few episodes and I understand how everything works in all the latest scientific vernacular, right?
But when I get around to reading Orthodoxy, I realize that Chesterton’s writing and philosophy embodies how I actually want to live my life. He doesn’t convince me one way or the other about the origins of the universe, but he convinces me that it’s a pretty meaningless thing for me to believe I need to figure out. Chesterton was a man who enjoyed his life and he enjoyed not knowing everything. Despite his constant self-deprecation, the man was absolutely brilliant and such a gifted–albeit verbose and confusing–writer.
Reading Orthodoxy, I start thinking: “Man, that’s how I want to talk about my life.” It’s not the vocabulary or the syntax or the diction or any of that. It’s the fact that one can quickly and easily tell that the man knew how to live life to the fullest. Judging from his beyond-portly stature, it’s clear he did some things to the fullest better than others. Nevertheless, it’s his personality that convinces me to stop thinking about these eternal questions.
Despite all that, you shouldn’t think that I’m saying that Chesterton couldn’t wrap his head around such big ideas and he was blissfully ignorant about such things. That is not remotely true. He actually presents logical, astute counterarguments to each of his philosophical opponents with incredible wit and clarity. For example:
Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is “unique,” and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), “All chairs are quite different,” he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them “all chairs.”
Or…
Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.
Chesterton was a jovial man who publicly debated frequently and joined his opponents in a bar afterwards for drinks. He maintained friendships with men with whom he disagreed.
His obesity notwithstanding, Chesterton is a hero of mine, if only for his writing of Orthodoxy. He penned many, many other books and I’ve yet to find the time to read any of them. Every time I start one, I just get distracted or go back to Orthodoxy. There’s enough in the book to last me a lifetime of learning and correction.
You can download Orthodoxy for free via Project Gutenberg, or on any of the major online e-bookstores (iBooks for instance).
If you are further interested in this type of heady reading, please check out Charles J. Chaput’s supremely excellent essay Being Human in an Age of Unbelief.
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