Chesterton's Journey to Orthodoxy

n Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, William Oddie retraces G.K. Chesterton’s journey from heresy to orthodoxy. It’s hard to believe, but Chesterton was raised a Unitarian and, in 1896, at age 22, still didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Yet only a few years later, at age 29, he confessed his belief in Christianity in public. And in 1908, at age 34, he published Orthodoxy, a work about “the nature of his faith and the origins of his own beliefs,” a work clearly in “the Catholic tradition — rather than some version of basic or ‘mere’ Christianity.” It would be fourteen years before he entered the Catholic Church, but at this point he had already “completed the intellectual and spiritual armoury with which he was to wage a one-man anti-modernist counter-revolution for the rest of his life.”

This book is a milestone in Chesterton studies, which are still in their infancy. Oddie displays an impressive mastery not just of GKC’s printed works, but also of his manuscripts in the British Library, catalogued by R.A. Christophers and first published in 2001. This catalog, Od­die remarks, has established a new foundation for all future GKC scholarship.