Theological Journal - April 24: Chesterton = Imagination


As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. – Orthodoxy

Interesting that in a work titled Orthodoxy Chesterton valorizes mystery. Much of the modern project has been about eradicating mystery in life, and as an unintended side effect, imagination with it. Orthodoxy became doctrine and moralism replaced faith as life’s animating force. A doctrinaire moralism (of the right of the left) breeds only death because it sacrifices life’s depth for some supposed greater measure of control and manipulation of life and history.

Life became constricted and narrowed. Understanding replaced mystery, prose supplanted poetry, we became infatuated with life’s glittering and glamorous surface and willingly traded life’s inexplicable, unmanageable, unconquerable, mysteries for it.

Orthodoxy grows out of and is sustained by mystery. Worship is its proper home, life its dramatic stage, imagination its organ of meaning, and vitality its essence.

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