Still Crazy After All These Years

November 17, 2008 by djackson.

Orthodoxy turns one hundred this year. Please note the italics.

“Orthodoxy” as in the name of the Eastern Church has a much longer pedigree - all the way back to Peter at Pentecost if not Jesus at the Jordan to hear my Greek friends tell it. Orthodoxy per se, as in core Christian doctrine, is also much longer in the tooth. No, I refer to the slim little volume by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, published by John Lane Press in 1908 and never out of print since.

I admit that I didn’t figure this out on my own but discovered it by reading an informative and insightful article by Ralph C. Wood in the current issue of First Things. Dr. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, points out that Chesterton’s faith autobiography “prophesied the ailments of both modernism and postmodernism, while adeptly commending Christianity as their double cure.” I’ll leave Dr. Wood to make that case, which he does quite convincingly. But Wood’s article did what all good writing about good books does: made me want to read the book itself. Accordingly, I returned to my much-underlined copy for a fresh look. As the fruit of that blessing, and perhaps as a tribute to Dr. Wood, I want to take the far less systematic approach of simply pointing out a couple of random instances of GKC’s remarkable prescience. (I feel fairly justified in this approach. Chesterton himself in chapter nine, “Authority and the Adventurer,” commends just such a piecemeal epistemology. “It is,” Chesterton opines, “precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend.”)

Instance one: A recent notice in the New York Times tells me that fundamentalist atheist Richard Dawkins plans to write a children’s book designed to debunk fairy tales and teach children to see the world through a test tube instead of a magic mirror. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/arts/31arts-THEGODDELUSI_BRF.html) In a sentence worthy of our lame duck president Dawkins stammers, “I would like to know whether there’s any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and magic wands and things turning into other things - it is unscientific, I think it’s antiscientific. Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know.”

Well, Chesterton replies from a century earlier that it does, indeed, have a pernicious effect: the effect of affirming a child’s sense that there is more to life, must be more to life, than the adults let on with all their babble about facts and laws of nature. They had, at least in Chesterton’s case, the pernicious effect of bringing him to Christ. “My first and last philosophy,” he recalls, “that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. . . .The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.” The author goes on to argue that “The Ethics of Elfland” (chapter four of Orthodoxy) teach us that certain consequences follow certain actions because a magical mind insists upon it. By contrast, Chesterton believes, the “laws” of nature (so dear to Dawkins) are, left to themselves, the merest chance. “It is not argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet.”

I do not claim here to give Chesterton’s full argument in favor of fairy tales over science. I merely point out that he foresaw a century ago what Dawkins has just now figured out: that the place to begin tearing down religion is not in the Sunday School but in the nursery, not by outlawing the King James but by outlawing the Brother’s Grimm.

I will toss in an observation of my own, though a stray one. It amuses me that Dawkins ponders the pernicious effect of teaching children about “things turning into other things.” That, after all, is the basis of his whole Darwinist world-view! In fact, Chesterton has addressed this elsewhere, writing in The Everlasting Man that, “nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.” Thus fairy tales are fare more scientific than Dawkins’ science. If the fairy godmother turns three mice into coach horses, at least she has mice to work with. If God creates the world when he has nothing to start with, we at least can start with God when dealing with the fact of the world!

My second random example comes from another newspaper article, headlined, “Hospices Use More Chaplains and New Path Toward Secular.” (http://www.capc.org/forums/chaplaincy/msg_1225728522/view) It seems that more atheists and agnostics are dying and are figuring out that atheism and agnosticism aren’t much help with the job. So they want a chaplain, but they want one who has had a theologectomy. Chesterton deals with this idea in the above-mentioned ninth chapter, “Authority and the Adventurer” where he takes up the argument, “If you see clearly the kernel of common-sense in the nut of Orthodoxy, why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut?” I’ll leave the reader to chase down GKC’s argument for herself. My business here is with a specific line in the above-mentioned article. The writer speaks of these bold secular spiritual guides (a striking oxymoron!) and “their tenacious interaction with mortality, often without the shield of sacramental ritual.” In chapter five, “The Flag of the World,” Chesterton quotes a newspaper article that mentions “Christianity when stripped of its armor of dogma,” and tosses in a smirking aside: “as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones.”)

The remark is entirely apt. The article pictures a spiritual advisor who denies the existence of the Holy Spirit as some sort of hero who eschews the coward’s “shield” of irrational belief. Well, a rationalist might disbelieve in dragons - fair enough. If, however, he distributes business cards and opens a website advertising his services as a dragon-slayer, his refusal to use a shield proves not his courage but his incompetence. Who would hire a plumber who boasted that he offered “a tenacious interaction with hair-clogs without the shield of a snake and monkey wrench”?

I’m going to stop there, hopefully having done what I said all good reviews do: made you want to read Chesterton’s book and Wood’s article about Chesterton’s book. That a century-old document could offer a preemptive strike against tomorrow’s headlines must be, I would think, recommendation enough. I will end with a quote from another great, unscientific corrupter of the youth of Athens, a man who wrote stories about talking moles and sculling rats and reckless driving toads, the great Kenneth Grahame. The author of The Wind in the Willows once wrote to a friend that, “a dragon, for instance, is a more enduring animal than a pterodactyl. I have never yet met anyone who really believed in a pterodactyl; but every honest person believes in dragons - down in the back-kitchen of his consciousness.”

And as long as I believe in dragons, I’m hanging onto my shield.

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