‘My Doxy Is Orthodoxy’

Let us agree on the truth of the following three propositions: a) thinking exists for the sake of judgment just as motion exists for the sake of rest; b) convictions are judgments; c) an orthodoxy consists of a set of related convictions concerning the final meaning of human life within history. From the above propositions I draw the following conclusions: conviction is the repose, and orthodoxy the home of the human spirit. Without the one the soul of man sickens in the midst of indecision; without the other, it withers in the desert of doubt. Were there no final answer to the terrible mystery of being, man would still find it necessary to invent one: he would do this in order that he might remain a man.

It is the mark of the highly civilized skeptic that he sees these things, that he finds in all the inquisitions that man has raised up in every society throughout history for the sake of the preservation of orthodoxy more than mere repression and the failure to love. He sees these things and he condemns them; but he sees something more profound: the very defense of the human spirit against that which it cannot face and remain itself: the awful spectre of a final doubt and the terrifying experience of those who, in the words of Hilaire Belloc, “see at last that there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to • legend, and at last they enter that ” shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.” A civilized skeptic, is a man who deplores his own disease and who would shield his fellow men from its contagion. A civilized skeptic is a man who would turn his proselytizing kin over to the secular arm. He would do this reluctantly, but he would do it all the same. Being civilized and therefore humane, he would sense a duty to the common good, in this instance to the good itself of corporate and personal sanity. The civilized skeptic would have voted for the execution of Socrates.

FW

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Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

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Let us agree on the truth of the following three propositions: a) thinking exists for the sake of judgment just as motion exists for the sake of rest; b) convictions are judgments; c) an orthodoxy consists of a set of related convictions concerning the final meaning of human life within history. From the above propositions I draw the following conclusions: conviction is the repose, and orthodoxy the home of the human spirit. Without the one the soul of man sickens in the midst of indecision; without the other, it withers in the desert of doubt. Were there no final answer to the terrible mystery of being, man would still find it necessary to invent one: he would do this in order that he might remain a man.

It is the mark of the highly civilized skeptic that he sees these things, that he finds in all the inquisitions that man has raised up in every society throughout history for the sake of the preservation of orthodoxy more than mere repression and the failure to love. He sees these things and he condemns them; but he sees something more profound: the very defense of the human spirit against that which it cannot face and remain itself: the awful spectre of a final doubt and the terrifying experience of those who, in the words of Hilaire Belloc, “see at last that there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to • legend, and at last they enter that ” shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.” A civilized skeptic, is a man who deplores his own disease and who would shield his fellow men from its contagion. A civilized skeptic is a man who would turn his proselytizing kin over to the secular arm. He would do this reluctantly, but he would do it all the same. Being civilized and therefore humane, he would sense a duty to the common good, in this instance to the good itself of corporate and personal sanity. The civilized skeptic would have voted for the execution of Socrates.