An idea · Twentieth Century (to mid-century) · first attested 1908
The Paradox of Orthodoxy
Orthodoxy is a wild, living balance held at speed.
Chesterton overturns the usual charge that dogma is a chain and free thought an adventure. In Orthodoxy he argues the reverse: the creed is a careening chariot racing through the centuries, swerving again and again to miss the heresies that would have toppled it to one side or the other. Holding the whole of the truth is a balance harder and braver than any one-sided simplification. Here too belongs Chesterton's fence: coming upon a fence across a field, do not tear it down until you understand why it was put up, because the person who cannot see what a thing is for is the last one who should be destroying it.