# Human monstrosity as an explanation, not an insult

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH05.P026](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH05.P026/#char=748,801): "I myself was at once worse and better than all things"

Pascal offers a useful earlier comparison for the apparently cheerful discovery of human ‘monstrosity’. In the Pensées, fragment 434, human beings combine an aspiration to truth with persistent error; their contradictory condition becomes intelligible through creation and the Fall. Fragment 431 similarly describes humanity as having lost its place, while 433 asks a true religion to explain both human greatness and littleness. [Pensées, fragments 431–434](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm).

Chesterton gives this explanatory structure a distinctive emotional result: an account of estrangement restores joy because it explains an experience that assurances of natural fitness had left unexplained. The preceding paragraph explicitly invokes the Fall, so ‘monstrosity’ means a disordered excellence, not merely biological abnormality. This is a comparison of arguments, not evidence that Chesterton borrowed the passage. The Pensées first appeared posthumously in 1670; the inspected English witness is Gutenberg's transcription of a 1958 Dutton edition, whose fragment numbering should not be assumed universal.

## Sources

- [Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensées, Gutenberg ebook 18269, reproducing the 1958 Dutton edition](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm), Section VII, fragments 431–434, especially printed pp. 119–122; edition statement at front
- [G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (first published 1908), Gutenberg ebook 16769](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16769), Chapter V, final two paragraphs

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