G. K. Chesterton’s most renowned book is a hundred years old. Orthodoxy was first published in London by John Lane Press in 1908, and it has never gone out of print—with more than two dozen publishers now offering editions of the book. Graham Greene once described it as “among the great books of the age.” Etienne Gilson declared that Chesterton had a philosophical mind of the first rank. Hugh Kenner said that the only twentieth-century author with whom Chesterton could be compared is James Joyce. And Dorothy Day was inspired to return to Christianity mainly by reading Orthodoxy. Indeed, we might say that the last century belongs to Chesterton—for in that now one-hundred-year-old book, Orthodoxy, he remarkably prophesied the ailments of both modernism and postmodernism, while adeptly commending Christianity as their double cure.
Born in 1874 to Anglican parents who were functional Unitarians, Chesterton soon saw that their acculturated kind of Christianity would not suffice as an answer to the ills of the modern world. Largely under the influence of Frances Blogg, the high church Anglican who eventually became his wife, Chesterton gradually came to identify himself as a Christian. Indeed, he began to use Catholic as a synonym for Christianity. Partly in deference to Frances, however, Chesterton was not received into the Roman Catholic Church until 1922, when he was forty-eight, fourteen years before his death in 1936.
