My main reading project right now is Charles Taylor’s _A Secular Age_, which has been set for my Theology and Postmodernism module with John Milbank. In addition to that, however, I’ve just started G.K. Chesterton’s classic book Orthodoxy, which I have been told by many is quite brilliant! I read a few chapters this morning and have thoroughly enjoyed it so far, so I thought I’d share a couple of quotes.
First, here is a little gem where Chesterton hammers the modern liberal theologians of his day for rejecting the notion of basic human sinfulness. This was written in the early 1900s, and while the contemporary theological climate has changed somewhat since then, the quote maintains its potency, and positively drips with irony:
“If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all the atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”
This statement comes in the context of an argument Chesterton is making to try and show the absurdity of many of the principles underpinning the contemporary scholarship of his day. He goes on to make the point that it is not, as many might think, an excess of poetic and mystical imagination which can lead to insanity and madness, but a lack of it, combined with an excess of reason and logic. This is because the latter seeks to explain the world and reduce it to a set order, when according to Chesterton room must always be left for mystery. The poet is comfortable with and even embraces mystery, whereas the logician seeks to explain and remove it- an impossible task which risks sending him over the edge to madness:
“The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats on an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion… To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. 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.”
Chesterton, by the way, is not simply railing against reason here, but is more specifically warning of the dangers of an unbalanced and reductionist emphasis on reason to the exclusion of the poetic imagination and the acknowledgment of mystery. It is this that can send the logician mad, and lead him to come out with all sorts of nonsense. In a very healthy way, Chesterton recognises the limitations of reason without discounting its usefulness.
Legend.
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