Orthodoxy

G. K. Chesterton tells how he set out, as a young man, to invent a new philosophy of his own and discovered that it already existed: it was Christian orthodoxy. In lively chapters full of paradoxes, he argues that the madman is not the man who has lost his reason but the man who has lost everything except his reason, that fairy tales teach truer lessons about the world than modern rationalists, and that tradition is 'the democracy of the dead'.

Published in 1908 as a reply to critics of his earlier book Heretics, who said he attacked other people's views without stating his own, Orthodoxy has influenced readers from C. S. Lewis onwards, whether or not they share its faith. Chesterton (1874–1936) also wrote the Father Brown detective stories and The Man Who Was Thursday.