# Keeping the truths, surrendering their novelty

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH01.P004](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH01.P004/#char=1007,1119): "I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine."

The humiliation concerns a claim to originality, rather than the falsification of the beliefs themselves. Chesterton represents his arrival at Christianity as the recognition that convictions reached independently already belonged to a tradition. The repeated language of discovery therefore matters: finding something for oneself does not entail being the first person to find it.

This distinction develops an argument in *Heretics* (1905). Its opening essay objects that calling oneself heretical has become a claim to being intellectually courageous, while orthodoxy has become a term of discredit. Chesterton counters that the dissenter of an earlier age considered himself right even against powerful institutions: agreement with established power and conviction of truth are different things. The same essay praises the older liberal ideal that each person should bear independent testimony about ultimate questions. [*Heretics*, I, opening and the paragraph beginning “This was certainly not the idea.”](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/470/pg470-images.html)

There is also a pointed precedent in his treatment of Wells. Chesterton praises Wells for moving from sensational opinions toward ordinary ones when his judgment changes, treating the willingness to disappoint expectations of brilliance as evidence of sincerity. [*Heretics*, V, paragraph beginning “Now, this arresting, mental humility.”](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/470/pg470-images.html) Here Chesterton turns that test upon himself, with a significant difference: he claims to retain his convictions while surrendering their supposed novelty. Being supported by Christendom supplies the comic reversal of his imagined isolation; the paragraph does not demonstrate that agreement with a tradition, by itself, proves those convictions true.

## Sources

- [G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905; Project Gutenberg text derived from the twelfth edition, 1919)](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/470/pg470-images.html), I, ‘Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy,’ opening paragraphs and paragraph beginning ‘This was certainly not the idea’; V, ‘Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants,’ paragraph beginning ‘Now, this arresting, mental humility’

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