Red + White ≠ Pink

I just finished reading G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. It was a good read, but Chesterton doesn't really impress me very much as a writer. Maybe that's partly due to my just having finished a class on Victorian Britain. When I read Chesterton in the context of other Victorians, he doesn't really stand out that much to me. His writing even borders on annoying at times through his incessant use of puns. Almost every paragraph seems to be trying too hard to be clever.

That said, he has some incredibly thought-provoking ideas. Chesterton had his finger on the pulse of his times, and he seems very perceptive in his ability to notice things that are so often ignored, as often at the turn of the C20 as they are at the turn of the 21st.

I've always had an uneasy relationship with the idea of post-modernism, especially it's suggestion of relativism. Seeing everything in different shades of gray is problematic when we have an idea of black and white existing separately. But it seems so sound: Kant gave us subjectivity, the poets gave us layers of meaning, different interpretations, the Enlightenment and science gave us the dream of objective truth.

Chesterton's responses to the questions that ended up being so post-modern—especially how those questions are answered in Christianity—are refreshing. Here's one take:

"As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers."

Chesterton delights in the paradoxes of Christianity. He does not try to resolve them by blending them together. Nor does he try to understand them as a dialectic, perpetuating and being perpetuated by each other. He lets them exist co-separately. He says that Chrisianity keeps contrasting ideas—like life by way of death, like a celebration of celibacy and of family, like courage and modesty—and it keeps them "side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink."

Most strikingly, he suggests that "Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other." When I read passages like this, I feel a thrill, and I am grateful to Chesterton for putting it into words. I feel like some unresolved problem that I have been working through just got a little bit closer to a solution of sorts. But I have such a difficult time imagining how that solution might look in the real world.

That separate colors may remain distinct yet wholly combined is a paradox that we see every day, but, for me, continues to be veiled in mystery. Maybe the solution is to embrace the mystery while embracing the truth, as well. Is that a paradox?