I picked up G.K. Chesterton’s celebrated work of Christian apology Orthodoxy hot off the heels of the incredible The Man Who Was Thursday. Orthodoxy is a much different sort of work, which was no surprise, but it thrums with the same gleeful energy. In its pages, Chesterton offers a primer, not for conversion generally, but for his conversion, explaining the many ways that Christianity came to him as the answers to questions he didn’t even quite realize he was asking. The result is the slightly meandering but always amusing meanderings of a fleet mind.
Chesterton positions Christianity almost as an inevitability of thought. His arguments are often well-reasoned, though some of them feel kind of spurious. I was particularly unconvinced by his reasoning that miracles have been proven because they have been reported, and skepticism of these reports comes from intellectual bigotry, and not, say, a perennially unfulfilled request for slightly more evidence. He compares this to a court ignoring eye-witness testimony because the witness was only a peasant, ignoring the fact that in said trial, there is at least the indisputable fact of a dead body to discuss. The skeptic wants to see not only that the miracle was divine, but that it actually happened in the first place.
Nevertheless, Chesterton is a great thinker, and it’s a pleasure to read his thoughts. I can’t say I was converted, but I was certainly entertained.