Kari Tyree

My husband and I were reading Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton, and when we came across a passage contrasting poetry with reason, I thought of my recent foray into the world of fiction-writing. Fiction is something I have never done, or not since elementary school. My writing has always been non-fiction and poetry. Writing a novel was a completely different exercise, one that I was not sure I would be able to accomplish when I first set out to do it. What I discovered was a sense of expansion in my imagination, much different from the reasoning and logical, linear thinking required for writing essays. Not that novel-writing involves no logic or linear thinking (it does), but it also requires broadening and wondering about “what might happen next.” Solving the problem of the ending (the most difficult part to write, for me, hands down) was a creative exercise more than a logical one, much like the way Chesterton describes the poet “float[ing] easily in an infinite sea” (13).

And yet it required logic also. To write a cohesive story of any length means thinking through the connections of plot and character, making sure there are no holes, completing arcs set forth in the beginning to satisfy the sense of wholeness in the story (and to satisfy the reader!). I think Chesterton’s description of the poet as being “sane” (13) rather than “psychologically unreliable” (12) matches the sense that I had as I tried to get through writing the novel. In order to be imaginative and yet make sense, one has to be balanced.

Yet Chesterton seems to critique the role of reason quite strongly in this section of Orthodoxy, a point that puzzles me. He says that “[p]oetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion” (13). While the imaginative life “floats easily,” the reasoner winds up with nothing but fatigue to show for his pains. Further, the “poet only asks to get his head into the heavens,” while the “logician . . . seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits” (14). The life of reason, to Chesterton, apparently leads to mental breakdowns. Is there no role for reason?

I don’t believe so. Chesterton, an orthodox Catholic, would agree that reason is a gift of God to man and should be used appropriately. My take on his descriptions in these passages is not that Chesterton would propose we all abandon our logical faculties and embrace a life of mere whimsy. Instead, he is advocating a life of imagination that allows for unseen and not completely knowable things (i.e., God) to be accepted in the mind. Accepting the existence of God is the most rational thing one can do in the face of the existence of “the heavens,” into which the poet wants to get his head. Since the heavens do exist, what are we to make of them? The person who deigns solely to rely on reason and logic, absent of imagination – or what we might call faith – simply cannot comprehend all of the universe. The universe cannot be contained within the human mind.

So it is not that Chesterton seeks to do away with reason entirely; it is that he finds reason to be insufficient on its own. Without some imagination, which it seems Chesterton compares to a sense of rest in the enormous world that exists around us, we cannot function well. We grow weary. As Chesterton puts it, the “poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in” (13-14). By contrast, the person who relies solely on reason attempts to measure the expansive world, and cannot but fail.

Even the human mind itself, including its ability to reason, is beyond the ability of human reason to fathom. According to Chesterton, “[i]t is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. . . . a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head” (14). By contrast, I believe Chesterton would say the poet allows himself to revel in the mystery of the human mind (as well as the mysteries of the world all around), while still making rational sense of it all. Art (such as poetry and the novel) portrays rational truths about the world precisely as it imaginatively investigates questions that may not even have answers, or at least not answers at which we may arrive during this lifetime.

Note: I am still working through Orthodoxy, so I haven’t yet encountered what else Chesterton might have to say about reason and imagination. This post is just my speculation at this point during the reading.

Work Cited

Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. Ortho Publishing, 8 Mar. 2014.