In his brilliant study Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908, William Oddie revisits Chesterton's formative years to show how his critique of the modern culminated in Orthodoxy (1908), one of his finest books, in which he set out his distinctly Christian vision, celebrating God over nihilism, joy over despair, the common man over Superman, wonder over sophistry. Taking it as a given that, "We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome," Chesterton saw in the Christian tradition a means of acquiring that view by discovering the "romance of orthodoxy." "It is always easy to be a modernist," he wrote, "as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion … set along the historic path of Christendom … would indeed have been simple … But to have avoided them all has been a whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostate, the wild truth reeling but erect." If Orthodoxy is Chesterton's conversion story, Oddie's book is its illuminating exegesis.
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