G. K. Cnesterton as the representative of English Catholic Revival and his attitude to lying

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the issue of lying revealed in works of G. K. Chesterton, first of all in his “Orthodoxy”. This thinker reveals the most serious mistakes in the manner of thinking of his contemporaries, because he sees the danger of deadlock in such scenario of scientific development as well as the threat to ruin the foundation of common sense, reason and mind. Chesterton is one of the most prominent writers of English Catholic Revival style of the first part of the XX century. The activity of representatives of this style is connected with the attempt to answer to the challenges of their time, which have the attitude to appearance and development of new tendencies in philosophy and culture. The representatives of these tendencies rejected Christian manner of viewing a person and the world, the result of which was the anxiety and confusion. These tendencies also implicated the disguised lack of congruence as well as substantial errancy; – the consequence was the ruin of inner world of a person. Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” is closely connected with his wish to unmask the vices of his time and to communicate his own understanding of the Truth. The writer tells about his own way to find the truth in Christianity and in the same time he reveals the disguised lying. One of his approaches to prove his point of view is to analyze the facts and to do it fairly and in integral way. With this aim he uses the logic, which operates the facts and does it in proper way, considering the true and real facts. This logic has the intention to move ahead and avoid the tendencies to be reframed into the vicious circle. The other important and interesting approach of Chesterton in the course of facts interpretation is rather “illogical” and includes the faith as the ground for the very possibility of thinking, and therefore for the very existence of logic. He states that there is no sense to set a question of choice between the faith and logic, because the very logic is the question of faith – our thoughts have to be admitted as the ones which have the attitude to reality, and this is the matter of faith.