Heretics: and Orthodoxy

"The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us,” G.K. Chesterton. Heretics Chesterton devotes each chapter of Heretics to a different writer or thinker. With his trademark elegance, he breaks down their ideas piece by piece. The chapter on H.G. Wells is as memorable as that of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of Oscar Wilde, Chesterton pronounces: “The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion, but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may, its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.”