It’s usually only the rationalists and skeptics who find their way into the great surveys of thought. But religion always rises from the ashes. This is thanks in no small part to the imaginative thinkers who revealed Christianity as what it always was, although not always ideally expressed by us: a thing of mystery, romance, adventure, and ultimately joy. They can truly be said to have changed the world.

It’s perhaps not commonly known that G.K. Chesterton’s great work of religious imagination, Orthodoxy, bears the subtitle The Romance of Faith. This subtitle is not included in most present-day editions of the book; yet it expresses something essential about Chesterton’s point of view and his position as against the thought of his day. Christianity as presented by Chesterton bears the aura of the romantic, the imaginative, and the fascinatingly mysterious. Yet Chesterton brilliantly juxtaposes the word “romance” with the word “orthodoxy,” a word with severe, authoritarian connotations in the popular imagination. This combination of title and subtitle points to Chesterton’s love for paradox but also his belief that paradox expresses essential realities. Chesterton’s point is that orthodox thought and belief is anything but stodgy and dull and restrictive; it is on the contrary liberating, imaginatively compelling, and in harmony with our deepest nature and needs.

This was a point of view developed by several generations of thinkers who in their writings challenged the advance of secular thought from the early Enlightenment onward. Perhaps “imaginative orthodoxy” would be a good name for this school of thought, which can be seen reflected in a whole panoply of writers from Blaise Pascal in the 17^th century to St. John Henry Newman, Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis, among countless others. We “Imaginative Conservatives” take for granted the ideas of the moral imagination, of the need for mystery as a complement to reason, the mythopoetic interpretation of reality as the journey of the soul in the light of religious revelation, countering the soullessness of materialism and rationalism. But we should recognize that these concepts, this interpretation and articulation of the religiously centered worldview, was an achievement of a particular time in history and a particular set of thinkers, a school of thought and sentiment that continues to affect us today. And while it was strongly informed and conditioned by the Romantic movement in Western culture, it can be seen to have started much earlier, in writers who reacted to the scientific Enlightenment of the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, a movement of great accomplishment but whose ultimate drift was to replace spiritual with mechanistic values and weaken the traditional view of man as a fallen creature who aspires to heaven.

It would be wrong, I think, to see these modern tendencies in terms of a one-sided attack on religion by secularism because, beset by decadence, institutions like the church can experience decay from within. As we know from experience, there has always existed among some believers a drily dogmatical and legalistic approach to the faith—an approach that consists in a willful assent to the church’s doctrines and adherence to its practices, and no more—and religious rationalism surely played a role in the development of rationalism in general. Biblical literalism (interpreting scripture without the use of the imaginative faculty) has always needed combating. Further, the new secular and skeptical movements came at a time of general malaise throughout society, when Western Europe was weary from the devastation of the religious wars and doctrinal strife of the previous hundred years. Widespread doctrinal questioning created widespread confusion and a crisis of belief. With so many rival interpretations of Christianity, whom should we believe? Does religion have credibility at all, since the church which Christ promised would prevail seems to have lost its unity? The secular tendencies in the Renaissance, bent on reviving the thought and culture of the classical past, added another complication, as did new discoveries in science which seemed to put in question old ways of seeing the universe. The age called for thinkers that could reassert the prerogatives of faith in a universally appealing way that both engaged with secular thought and jumped straight over the specific doctrinal issues that had led to the Reformations.

It helped that the world of intellect was much more holistic in the early modern period, with the rigid division of knowledge that we take for granted today being unknown then. Many thinkers of the 17^th through the 19^th centuries are hard to classify because they took an interest in so many different subjects, and inquiry into science and into theology was often carried out by one and the same person. In these centuries, one could very well be a scientist and a man or woman of faith. Thus, imaginative Christian thinkers were able to address secularism on the basis of secular learning, meeting skeptical arguments on their own terms. The principal tendencies that the great Christian thinkers of the modern period stood against were rationalism, skepticism, and materialism. What they stood for was far more expansive: the freedom of human choice, the validity of mystery, the necessity of faith as a response to experienced reality, the agreement of faith with reason, and much else.

One of the most enduring of these early countercultural thinkers was Blaise Pascal. A scientist and mathematician as well as an intense Catholic believer, Pascal’s collection of aphorisms known as the Pensées plunge into the fathomless paradoxes of faith, reason, and human nature. Worthy of note, June 19 of this year marked the 400^th anniversary of Pascal’s birth, and to mark the occasion Pope Francis has issued an apostolic letter, Sublimitas et miseria hominis (The Grandeur and Misery of Man), that serves as an excellent introduction to this great soul.*

Pascal’s pithy “Thoughts” still pack enormous power today, perhaps especially so. Writing against the rationalism of such thinkers as Descartes as well as against religious skepticism and worldliness of lifestyle, Pascal urged us to use the full extent of our reason to find the truth of the world around us, yet also to acknowledge reason’s limits and the claims of mystery. Man, according to Pascal, is not the king of the universe; neither is he a miserable worm. He is something in between those extremes, poised between misery and happiness. We feel in our bones that we are “dispossessed kings,” who have lost something immeasurably great (a thread which Chesterton and C.S. Lewis would pick up centuries later). Despite our tragic condition, salvation is open to us if we acknowledge our helplessness and dependence on a higher power. This higher power, identified with divine grace, operates in the world and in our hearts. God is partly known and partly hidden to us; he is clothed in mystery, but we can access him through areas of experience that are not precisely those of reason and deduction, that are more connected with the heart and its “intuitive vision.” A key ingredient in Pascal’s planned apology for the Christian faith—which he did not live to complete—was to “make [religion] attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.” This would be part of the core essence of imaginative orthodox thought in generations to come.

While Pascal advocated looking beyond reason to find the truth about the universe and ourselves, a group of English thinkers in the following century took the opposite tack, using reason itself to show the plausibility of belief, turning the favorite weapon of the skeptics against them. In his Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature, the Anglican bishop Joseph Butler laid out a powerful case that Christian beliefs are compatible with we know through nature, reason, and the senses—but that they reveal, at the same time, that there is more to reality. Samuel Johnson, the versatile English man of letters, maintained a strongly argued Christian faith against the skepticism of Hume and others.

England remained a center for Christian renewal in the 19^th century, but there was activity across the Channel too. The novelist René de Chateaubriand, writing in the wake of the French Revolution’s antireligious campaigns, mounted a wholly fresh defense of faith in The Genius of Christianity, a beautiful apology for all things Christian that shows how Romanticism watered and enriched the new movement. With his emphasis on the validity of the poetic, intuitive, artistic, and imaginative in the discovery of truth, and his Romantic focus on the Middle Ages as an expression of the Christian spirit, Chateaubriand opened the door for the apologetic approach of such later writers as Chesterton. Chateaubriand’s writing led to a major revival of Catholicism in France, where it had been assumed to have been buried by the Reign of Terror.

Back in Britain, Romantic impulses yielded a stunning result in the Oxford Movement, whose greatest figure was John Henry Newman, at first an Anglican cleric and finally a cardinal of the Catholic Church. Picking up themes of conscience and the formation of the moral sense, Newman also delved into the process by which the mind searches for and attains to truth. He countered secularism in education by arguing for a holistic Catholic approach rooted in the knowledge of God and all that flows from it. The Oxford Movement as a whole found light and inspiration in the aesthetic heritage of Christendom, arguing for the importance of sacrament and ritual in forming the imagination and raising the human soul toward the numinous.

Around this same time, Blaise Pascal found a latter-day successor in the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, whose superb sense of irony echoes the French master for the new Romanticist age. Like Pascal, Kierkegaard was engaged in defending an inner faithfulness to the Christian creed against a prideful rationalism—this time in the form of the deterministic thought system of Hegel. Kierkegaard fought soulless determinism and its fixation on blind historical forces by putting man at the front and center of his existentialist thought. He proposed Christian faith as a personal commitment involving one’s whole being, with ethical choices always at the forefront of one’s consciousness. A man of high culture and artistic passions, Kierkegaard related—while at the same time distinguishing—the ethical and religious versus the aesthetic levels of life, all important in different ways and complementary. Kierkegaard’s writings are themselves artfully brilliant statements of his thought.

Along this journey of faith and intellect, there are some sympathetic fellow-travelers who, while not of an orthodox Christian faith, developed fresh and useful philosophical points of view and articulated the essence of traditional belief in a way that turns out to be of great value to religious thought. I would mention William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist. Opposing scientific materialism and determinism, James used his Pragmatic Method to argue that beliefs are justified by their effects in the world—the effects themselves being part of their “process of verification.” In an eloquently moving and personable way, James emphasized the imaginative and psychological value of faith and man’s inherent need to transcend himself and his material circumstances. He also stressed the multiplicity of truths and the validity of my experience “in here,” including experience of the religious and numinous, as a guide to the truth “out there,” giving us a testimony that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophies. James’s books The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy express beautifully his thoughts on the importance of faith in human life.

The stream of English 19^th-century Christian thinkers led naturally to some of the greatest and most familiar names in the Christian revival, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. What more can say about these knights of Christianity? Chesterton picks up on the use of paradox, integral to Pascal and Kierkegaard, and makes it his signature. But in contrast to those very grave writers, Chesterton’s keynote is jollity and good humor. That Chesterton was first and foremost a journalist helped to make his ideas widely known among common people, and C.S. Lewis, likewise, with his wartime talks and popular books became an evangelist for a modern mass audience. As such, the accomplishment and impact of both on modern culture were immeasurable—something less possible for the earlier, more strictly philosophical writers who were destined to be appreciated by a smaller public, however beautifully and lucidly they wrote. Perhaps the greatest of Chesterton’s achievements was to show that, in the words of Phillip Lopate, “there is nothing stuffy about being religious, that it is indeed the highest kind of sanity” and that it is compatible with humor and wit and romance. In this light we should add to the duo Dorothy Sayers, whose little treatise The Mind of the Maker, interpreting theology in aesthetic terms and art in theological terms, is a wonderful contribution to imaginative orthodoxy.

In their style and approach, the modern Christian thinkers were dynamic rather than dogmatic; better, they showed that dogma, authoritative belief, is necessary and reasonable and a rational expression of a mythos—a transcendent truth. But they were not merely polemicists; they were artists who carried out their argument in an artistic way. The defense of truth can turn propagandistic when it neglects the aesthetic, poetic, and imaginative dimensions of discourse. These imaginative thinkers left a legacy of reflecting on religious truths in a way that capitalized on those qualities. Interpreting Christian doctrine in terms of imagination and mystery, they turned the tables on rationalists, materialists, and skeptics as “these great dogmatists to whom no knowledge is denied” (to use Pascal’s words of invective). Instead of Christianity being authoritarian, it turned out that the materialists were the most illiberal of all for not allowing any glimmer of mystery into their closed universe. We find Lewis arguing, in the middle of the 20^th century, for the continued veracity of the Fall, the Incarnation, the Redemption, not as powerful myths that are no longer credible as reality, but as a credible account of reality itself.

There is of course much more that could be said, many more figures that could be named. This is simply a brief unscientific survey (with apologies to Kierkegaard) of some of the writers who have most deeply affected me thus far. I find it notable that in every era a rationalist or skeptical thinker has found his match in an orthodox one: Descartes was answered by Pascal; Hume by Joseph Butler; Hegel by Kierkegaard; H.G. Wells by Chesterton, and so on. Yet it’s usually only the rationalists and skeptics who find their way into the great surveys of thought. The lesson here is that while skepticism always thinks it has the last word and that faith and religion are on the wane, religion always rises from the ashes. This is thanks in no small part to the imaginative thinkers who revealed Christianity as what it always was, although not always ideally expressed by us: a thing of mystery, romance, adventure, and ultimately joy. They can truly be said to have changed the world.

Note:

*See Apostolic Letter “Sublimitas et Miseria Hominis” of the Holy Father Francis on the Fourth Centenary of the Birth of Blaise Pascal (19 June 2023).

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The featured image is “Faith” (1776) by Marcello Bacciarelli, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.