Chesterton’s trademark — which his admirers marvel at and his detractors mock — is his use of paradox. He had uncanny ability to turn the opponent’s argument or premise upside down and inside out, often resulting in startling clarity. This use of paradox, far from being mere cleverness or wordplay, was the result of Chesterton’s outstanding philosophical perception. Hugh Kenner, in his study Paradox In Chesterton (Sheed and Ward, 1947), states that “there is good and bad paradox” and Chesterton’s paradox’s were good, for they rejoiced in the unexpected, reveled in the mysterious, and boasted of the transcendent. “The object of verbal paradox, then,” Kenner writes, “is persuasion, and its principle is the inadequacy of words to thoughts, unless they be very carefully chosen words. But the principle of metaphysical paradox is something inherently untractable in being itself; in the Thing” (17). In other words, reality itself is paradoxical, and so good paradox reveals something to us about reality and truth.
The Christian Faith, of course, is a grand Paradox: God is Three in One; God the Son became man and died; we must lose our lives to save them. These are the mysteries that Chesterton loved to contemplate and trumpet, flouting the foolishness of God in the face of the wisdom of man. In Orthodoxy, in a chapter titled “The Paradoxes of Christianity,” the unique and mysterious nature of Christianity is shown through the lens of its enemies’ contradictory criticisms:
As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith … a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind — the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. (Orthodoxy [New York: Image Books, 1990] 84-85).
This radical balance of Christianity would be a recurring theme in Chesterton’s apologetic writings. While a heresy is the imbalanced belief that a narrow portion of the truth is the whole truth (i.e. Arianism taught that Jesus was true man), orthodoxy is capable of holding seemingly opposing views in a paradoxical balance (i.e., Jesus is true man and true God). This feature of orthodoxy is a most helpful touchstone for the apologist in recognizing doctrinal error. Orthodoxy is always balanced despite the leanings and weaknesses of the era in which the Catholic lives:
This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly…. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom — that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.(Orthodoxy, 100-101).
We can be tempted to simplify the Faith in an attempt to persuade others that it is logical and “not so hard to understand.” But while the Faith is, in a real way, simple, it is the sort of simplicity — such as the Trinity or Incarnation — that boggles the mind and escapes full comprehension. Embracing the paradoxes of Christianity is not acting on blind faith; rather, it is faith seeking understanding — something Chesterton did so well.
(This article was originally published in a different form in the November/December 1999 This Rock, a publication of Catholic Answers (www.catholic.com.)
