Review: Heretics by G.K. Chesterton

One of the rewarding things about reading Chesterton's work is watching him pick up the thread he began in one book and continue it in another--or in my case, since I read a few of the later ones first, winding the thread back and finding out what set it spinning in the first place. Orthodoxy has been my favorite for years upon years, and all this time I had no idea that he'd written it as a follow-up to Heretics, with a view towards expanding on a few ideas he had introduced therein--views which had not been  elaborated on to the satisfaction of his critics.

(In this sense, Heretics serves the same role in Chesterton's nonfiction that The Napoleon of Notting Hill serves in his fiction--the starting point of a hundred ideas. The creative seeds that flew from the finished Notting Hill not only took root in Chesterton's own later works Manalive and The Man Who Was Thursday, but in George Orwell's 1984 and, more recently, in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.)

An early work cannot be elaborate if it is to set off later works--it is the business of the later works, such as Orthodoxy, to be elaborate. But, above all, an early work must be bold, and this one fairly crackles on the page. It doesn't get much bolder than fixing a book with a title like Heretics and then christening each chapter after a well-known author of the day. A good start, I call it, and Chesterton likely thought so too. Small question why it set the critics gnawing on his heels.

While it's pleasant to start the book familiar with the names Chesterton mentions--Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph McCabe and H.G. Wells among them--it is far from necessary. The chapters provide us with all the information we need on these writers and philosophers, including full quotations. Even better, Chesterton does not merely argue with them or critique them, but uses them as a starting point for his own rocketing, riotous thoughts, eventually exposing them, one after the other, to his topsy-turvy point of view, tipping them on their heads, shaking them, and seizing hold of the worthwhile things that fall out of their minds and trouser-pockets. It's a conceit Chesterton himself might have cherished; that of a robber who steals a man's coins, bites them to see which are counterfeit, and returns the rest to their owner--render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, after all. 

One heretic, however, is noticeably missing from Chesterton's lineup, in much the same way Spider-Man is noticeably missing from The Avengers. I can't help but squint my eyes and look around for George Orwell. Now, I doubt that this was even Orwell's hour; my best guess is that he came a generation later, considering that Chesterton's fiction influenced his own writing. But right from the introduction, entitled "On the Importance of Orthodoxy", I could just feel him hovering on the outskirts of Heretics like the anarchist Lucian Gregory around the Council of Days in The Man Who Was Thursday, absent chapter after chapter yet waiting for his turn to speak. Gregory's nemesis, incidentally, is the hero of Thursday and goes by the strange name of Syme, and Orwell appropriated the name for a rather greasy side character in 1984, whether in rebuke of Chesterton or in tribute it is difficult to say. Orwell's Syme understands the schemes of the Party better than any other character, and yet the very Syme (as Chesterton's Syme might have said "in his most exquisite Cockney") is firmly enthusiastic about their application. "Orthodoxy," states Orwell's character with relish, "means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." Without saying a word--without even appearing--Orwell says, Chesterton, I beg the question. 

And Chesterton answers it. He makes reply to that which has not been spoken. "But if there be such a thing as mental growth," he writes,

it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. … Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable of, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

There you have it--Orwell turned on his head. Orthodoxy is consciousness. If you're still not convinced--as neither were Chesterton's critics--you can, and should, read Orthodoxy, for it was written with you in mind. But if you merely wish for more feats in the same vein, if you wish to see Chesterton shake famous men and still more famous ideals by the ankles, I can suggest no better stop than Heretics.  Button your pockets.