Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

On the Inability to Blaspheme

On the Inability to Blaspheme The first pages of Heretics () are entitled “Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy.”These remarks were written about five years after the turn of the twentieth century, just as these present remarks are written some five years before its ending.Were it not apt to make me sound out-of-date, I am inclined to think nothing much has changed. That is to say, the permanent things remain permanent and we are among the permanent things, even in our death. I have always been struck by these particular introductory remarks . They say in their own way what John Paul II said recently , in Veritatis Splendor, that freedom needs truth, that things are not relative, that the most important fact to know about a man is what is his philosophy and whether it is true or not.We like to be nice and to be tolerant without ever wondering whether there are some things we ought not to be nice about or whether we ought to tolerate what will destroy us. Chesterton began his remarks with a reflection on the strange fate of the word “orthodoxy,” a word we have come to associate with Chesterton himself. Orthodoxy means literally right thinking or right thought. It implies, thus, that there is a wrong thought or thinking, that it is possible, indeed, incumbent, to distinguish one from the other. For someone who thinks contrary to the standard of truth, we traditionally use the word “heretic.” The heretic is someone who deviates on some or all points from the “orthodox.” A new mood came in during Chesterton’s time about the word “heretic.” Formerly, the heretic never maintained he was a heretic. Rather, he maintained that he was orthodox and that 103 everyone else who disagreed with him was heretical. He took the truth of his heresy seriously. The heretic wanted to be right, thought he was right, and fought for his rightness.This zeal does not mean that he was not still in principle a heretic, but the heretic belonged to the same world as the orthodox, to the single world in which truth was one and demanded the attention of every mind, demanded the test of truth for every doctrine and every position opposed to it. What Chesterton noticed was that the “heretic” had suddenly ceased to claim he was right. He was looking for “applause” at the novelty of his views just because they were his. “Heretical” came to mean being “clear-headed,” while the word “orthodoxy ” came to be identified practically with “being wrong.”The conclusion Chesterton drew from this situation was insightful:“It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical.”1 The heretic “boasts” of his heresy and does not worry about the implied craziness. Of course, it is “foolish” for one philosopher to set another philosopher on fire simply “because they do not agree in their theory of the universe.”This method was tried in the “last decadence of the Middle Ages” and found impractical. But at least the effort of one philosopher to set another of opposing views on fire attested to the seriousness of their mutual enterprise.What is objectively more absurd than this mutual burning is to suggest that the solution for the inflamed passions of the philosophers is to pronounce that ideas have no consequences and are unimportant. The twentieth century arrived with this opinion that “philosophy does not matter.” All general theories were deflated. The rights of man are as heretical as the fall of man. Shaw’s famous dictum that “the golden rule is that there is no golden rule” was the lowest form of intellectual disorder to which we could descend . The fact that we have no general theory in which we validate all things means that we try to say that our ideas on partic104 On the Inability to Blaspheme ular things are significant but our theories on all things are insigni ficant. “A man’s opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter.”2 After examining all particular things, modern man cannot claim to have found the cosmos, to have found some order. “Everything matters—except everything.” Thus, we pretend to think that it makes no difference to what...