Catholic Thought discussion

Chapter 6 Summary: The Paradoxes of Christianity.

Chesterton describes how he developed his thinking: “pagan” at twelve, an “agnostic” at seventeen. Freethinkers such as Tom Paine “unsettled (his) mind horribly” (p. 127). He came to orthodox theology by way of Huxley (has to be the father Thomas) and Herbert Spencer. The attacks on Christianity by them were that it is something gloomy, pessimistic, opposed to life, anti-Nature, dreary. Atheistic lectures almost brought him to Christianity leading him to think that it must be something “extraordinary”. What dawned on Chesterton was that these attackers, even poets (Swindburne) were themselves poor judges of Christianity’s relation to happiness as they themselves were pessimists. He recognized self-contradictions in the attackers’ arguments: Chesterton gives a few examples but says there are dozens more.

1. Christianity is both too pessimistic and too optimistic.
2. Christianity is against the family by dragging women to the cloister and that it is also forcing people to marriage and family forbidding life of contemplation.
3. Christianity restrains sexuality too much and not enough as Malthus argued.

This chapter addresses the dual needs of the Church expressed in many dualities symbols such as a lion and the lamb. Chesterton sets to describe how he found in his search for truth in life that Christianity offered him “so to speak illogical truth”. (p. 124) It’s difficult he writes to defend his reason for conviction to sum up the reasons because the case is very complex. It would be equally difficult to describe briefly why he prefers civilization to savagery.

The Church emphasized the celibacy and the family, having children, and not having children, and kept to both but not any kind of mixing of black and white to keep “two colors coexistent but pure.” (p. 147) It told some men to fight and others not to fight. The lion lied down with the lamb but did not become lamb-like. “Christian doctrine discovered the oddities of life to be merciful and also severe.”

Great analysis Galicius. I love the paradoxes. But I didn't begin to enjoy them until my first read of Chesterton.