More from Chesterton - "Orthodoxy" (#2)

In Orthodoxy, Chapter 9, Chesterton continues his evaluation of charges against religion, especially Christianity.

One of the many reasons I enjoy reading Chesterton is that he has such a delightful way of turning our thoughts inside out -- taking what is assumed (and taught in our secular educational institutions) and showing how illogical and void of reality they are.

The Truth is so simple and easy to understand. It is the falsehoods that are complex and complicated. "It is just not true," he often says.

Another reason I treasure his thinking is that so much of what he writes is basically a description of his own journey from atheism into faith....from complicated, unfounded assumptions, to the light of reality and truth.

Faith is not a leap into the dark -- it is a leap from the dark into the light!



I often wonder what field of study is the most prominent in illogical, fallacious arguments: history? geology? anthropology?

We usually point to biology as the chief culprit. But I sense all the fields of study are at fault for teaching what is just not true.

Here's an example from history -- the Church in the Dark Ages --


Chesterton writes:

     I take in order the next incident offered: the idea that Christianity belongs in the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalizations. I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.

     It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If anyone says that the faith arose in ignorance  and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't.  It arose in the Mediterranean civilizations in the full summer of the Roman Empire.

     The world was swarming with skeptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast.

     It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank, but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glistening, with the cross still at the top.  This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned the sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome.

     If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad into the twilight; and if civilization had ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag.

     But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and also the first life of the new.

     She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch, and she taught them how to invent a Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them....