The Madman and His Reason

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. ROMANS 1:22

Chesterton begins the argument of Orthodoxy proper in an unexpected place: the lunatic asylum. He had a reason. The modern world, he said, had given up believing in sin, but it had not yet given up believing in madness. Everyone could still agree that there is such a thing as a mind that has gone wrong. If he could show what madness really is, he could show something about the sane mind, and about the faith that keeps the mind sane.

The man who has lost everything except his reason

The common view is that a madman is a man who has lost his reason. Chesterton argued that the opposite is nearer the truth. In the chapter called The Maniac he wrote: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

He explained what he meant. A man who believes himself to be the victim of a vast conspiracy is not, in the ordinary sense, illogical. If you argue with him, he has an answer for everything. Every piece of evidence you offer can be fitted into his theory: if people are kind to him, it is because they are trying to deceive him; if they are not, it proves his point. His explanation is complete, and it is perfectly consistent. What is wrong with it is not that it is irrational, but that it is small. It is a perfect circle, and a very narrow one. He has shut himself into a tiny world, and he cannot get out, because his reason, working with terrible efficiency, keeps closing every door.

What the madman has lost is everything that a healthy mind brings alongside its reason: humour, charity, common sense, the willingness to be surprised, the ordinary certainties of experience that a man knows even when he cannot prove them. It is these, not logic, that keep a man sane.

Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the Lord, and depart from evil. PROVERBS 3:7

The modern madnesses

Chesterton then turned the picture on the philosophies of his day. The materialist, who holds that everything in the universe, including the human mind, is the product of blind physical causes, has exactly the madman’s kind of explanation. It is complete; it accounts for everything; and it leaves out everything that matters most, including the very freedom and reason by which the materialist claims to have discovered it. The man who holds that nothing is real except his own mind is in the same case. Each has a perfect circle of thought, and each is imprisoned in it.

The cure, Chesterton argued, is not more reasoning but more room. A sane man has always lived with mystery. He has kept one foot in the world of plain fact and the other in a world he cannot fully explain, and he has been content to let some things stay unexplained. In the same chapter Chesterton put it in four words: “Mysticism keeps men sane.” By mysticism he did not mean visions or trances. He meant the ordinary humility of a mind that knows it is not the measure of all things.

The circle and the cross

At the end of The Maniac he offered a picture that sums up the whole book. The symbol of the madman’s reason is the circle: perfect, complete, closed in upon itself, and unable to grow. The symbol of the Christian faith is the cross. At its centre there is a collision, two beams meeting at right angles, a contradiction that reason cannot smooth away — God and man, justice and mercy, death and life. But because it has a paradox at its heart, it can stretch out its arms for ever without changing its shape. “The cross opens its arms to the four winds,” he wrote; “it is a signpost for free travellers.”

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:18

The only doctrine that can be proved

In the same chapter Chesterton made one of his most quoted remarks about sin. The modern theologians of his day, he observed, were inclined to deny original sin — the doctrine that human nature itself is corrupted and inclined to evil. He thought this absurd, because original sin is the one Christian doctrine that anyone can check for himself. “Certain new theologians dispute original sin,” he wrote, “which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” A man has only to read a newspaper, or look honestly into his own heart, to see the evidence.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? JEREMIAH 17:9

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. ROMANS 3:23

Weighing it

Chesterton’s diagnosis of a reason cut loose from humility is one of the most penetrating things in modern Christian writing, and it is deeply scriptural. Paul says that the wisdom of the world, turned against God, ends in folly; Chesterton showed how, in particular cases, it happens.

A caution belongs here. Chesterton was a defender of reason, not its enemy, and he said so plainly in the next chapter. But a careless reader can take from him the notion that thinking is dangerous and feeling is safe, or that faith means not asking questions. That is not what he meant, and it is not what Scripture teaches. The Bible calls us to love God with all our mind, and the cure for a bad argument is a better one. What Chesterton opposed was not reason but reason that refuses to bow — reason that has made itself God.

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. MARK 12:30

A second caution concerns the word mysticism, which in Chesterton means something healthy and modest. The reader should not confuse it with the mystical techniques and private revelations that some have sought in place of Scripture. Chesterton’s mysticism was the humility of a man who knows that God is greater than his thoughts; and that humility is best learned by sitting under the Word that God has spoken.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of a time when you were completely convinced you were right and turned out to be wrong. What had you left out of the picture?

2. Are there areas of your life where you have built a closed circle of explanation — about a person, a grievance, or God Himself — that no evidence can break? Ask God to open it.

3. Read 1 Corinthians 1:18–31 slowly. Notice how Paul sets the cross against the wisdom of the world.

4. Look honestly at your own heart this week. Where do you see the evidence for original sin?

5. Read the chapter of Orthodoxy called The Maniac, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord, You made my mind, and You did not make it to be its own god.

Forgive me for the times I have shut myself into small circles of my own reasoning, and refused to be surprised by You.

Keep me sane with the sanity of humility. Let me think hard and kneel low.

And keep before my eyes the cross of Jesus Christ, which opens its arms to all the world, and on which my sin was borne. Amen.