G.K. Day: Dogma Matters
By: A.E. Carnehl, Guest Contributor
--------------------
The turn of the 20th century was marked by a number of new philosophies that had grown out of the Darwinism, Marxism, and scientific skepticism of the 19th century. Theosophists, or individuals following the ideas of Helena Blavatsky, maintained that personal spiritual ecstasy and open-mindedness were the means of encountering the Divine. Others, like those following Tolstoy (among other prominent writers), were rebelling against the Church and Catholicism declaring that Christian dogma was constricting and out of date.
In philosophy, the focus began to shift more and more toward individual subjectivity when it came to truth and morality. Communism, materialism, atheism, anarchism, pragmatism, and many other "–isms" stood in the path of common sense and Christianity.
Straddling this path with a sword cane and a pen stood G.K. Chesterton.
Chesterton tirelessly defended the idea that a human being was an animal that created dogmas, or to put it another way, a human was an animal in the Image of God. As a dogmatic creature, human beings had in their nature to make judgments and have beliefs. All the talk at the turn of the century of having an “open mind” for no other reason than to have an open mind was sheer nonsense to GKC. To hope, to dream, to pray, to love, to hate – all these human actions require basic beliefs, and the sum of one’s beliefs make up his dogma.
Chesterton is famous for declaring, “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
The following excerpt from a 1909 essay shows in more detail what G.K.C. meant by all this:
“In a vast number of cases, an adjective is ornate or exquisite to the point of artificiality; but that the word it is applied to is entirely forgotten. Thus, when they [free-thinkers] say, “Give us a broad religion,” it is reasonable enough, since one religion is really broader than another. But every religion is a religion; that is, it ties a man to something. A faith can be free up to the exact point where it is unfaithful. Or, again, there are politicians who call themselves “independent” politicians; and who boast that they are not attached to any part. They are not; but they would very much like the party to be attached to them. They have some theory or proposal or other; they cannot be any broader than that theory or proposal.
The truth is that if a man wishes to remain in perfect mental breadth and freedom, he had better not think at all. Thinking is a narrowing process. It leads to what people call dogma. A man who thinks hard about any subject for several years is in horrible danger of discovering the truth about it. This process is called becoming “sectarian,” also “hardening in later life”; it can also be described as “giving up to party what was meant for mankind.” It is a terrible think when a man really find that his mind was given him to use, and not to play with; or, in other words, that the gods gave him a great ugly mouth with which to answer questions, and not merely to ask them. The crocodile finds it easy enough to open his mouth and wait for a [tribesman] or an explorer. It is in knowing the exact moment at which to shut it that they really fastidious and dexterous crocodile shows his training. In the same way the modern man fancies he has reached supreme culture because he opens his intellect. But the supreme culture (in the forcible modern phrase) is to know when to shut your head.
There is one odd aspect of the man with this sort of open mind – a man whom one imagines with an open mouth. It is that being thus gaping and helpless, he is really brutal and oppressive. He tyrannizes; he forces on all other men his own insolent indecision. He forbids his followers to come to any conclusion till he has done so. He will allow no one else to find the truth, as Peary will allow no one else to find the Pole. He is the worst tyrant that the world has seen; he is the persecuting skeptic. He is the man who has held up the whole world now for over a hundred years. I thought of one or two examples, but there is no space to mention them. Perhaps it is just as well.”
-Illustrated London News, October 16, 1909
GK Day: New Years Resolutions
By: Jacqueline Otto, Guest Contributor
-----------------
“The paradox of courage is that one must be a little careless of life even in order to keep it.” – G.K. Chesterton 
I am not entirely sure where I first ran across this Chesterton-ism, but it was one I had scribbled on a post-it note and stuck to my desktop monitor many years ago. As times modernized, the quote was transferred from a post-it note to a Facebook quote and eventually a tweet which I favorited. As a result, this quote grew with me over the last few years without even knowing the significance of the author. In college I took a literature course on the Inklings, which lead me into a kind of a C.S. Lewis/G.K Chesterton Renaissance. A surprise to me, when I realized that Chesterton’s words of wisdom had already been influencing my life.
Coming into this New Year, it’s time to take stock of our lives and make goals. This nugget of Chestonian wisdom is one that I remember at New Years.
Society has a way of predetermining paths for us to take. There is a lot of pressure in the world, even from well-intentioned family members, for young people to go to this college, or major in this subject, or go to the law school that is their parent’s alma mater.
Many people will abdicate to society the authority to make decisions. These people find themselves with a degree they don’t want and debt they don’t need. They find themselves living somewhere they don’t like, married to someone they don’t love, and in a career that is leading them no where but to their psychiatrist’s couch.
The paradox to which Chesterton is referring is that your life will be lived by others if you don’t make the decisions necessary to keep possession of it. What you may need to do will seem risky if it goes against what your family, or your friends, or your culture tells you to do. But America is a country of risk-takers. Christianity is a faith of those who listen to their God before they listen to anyone else.
If you find yourself out of step with the pre-determined life that other are taking, then you will find yourself in good company. When making New Years resolutions for 2012, remember to be courageous and take risks. You won’t reach your God-given potential if you let society live your life.
GK Day: Some Poetry From The Big Guy
Courtesy: A.E. Carnehl, Guest Contributor
------------------
This poem by Gilbert Keith Chesterton is found in his superb book of poetry, The Ballad of St. Barbara, from 1922.
GK's entire personal philosophy was built around Christ and His Church, and he often said that he came to this divine realization through the "absurd wonder of reality." For Chesterton, it was nothing short of absurdly wonderful that a man should have two arms and two legs, let alone a mind or a soul. Creation and everything in it was beautifully crafted by God to point to His glory.
Enjoy this poem of his:
-------------------
Sunder me from my bones, O sword of God
Till they stand stark and strange as do the trees;
That I whose heart goes up with the soaring woods
May marvel as much at these.
Sunder me from my blood that in the dark
I hear that red ancestral river run
Like branching buried floods that find the sea
But never see the sun.
Give me miraculous eyes to see my eyes
Those rolling mirrors made alive in me
Terrible crystals more incredible
Than all the things they see
Sunder me from my soul, that I may see
The sins like streaming wounds, the life's brave beat
Till I shall save myself as I would save
A stranger in the street.
G.K. Day: The Autobiography
By: A.E. Carnehl, Contributor
G.K. Chesterton dictated his own autobiography to his secretary just weeks before he passed away in June of 1936. The Autobiography is fascinating to say the least, however, in typical Chestertonian fashion he has nothing to say about his accomplishments, successes, and even general events in his life. Rather the book is filled with anecdotes of his friends and acquaintances, and through different (usually humorous episodes) he traces the development of his thought from childhood through his agnostic and Unitarian twenties and eventually from orthodox Christianity to Roman Catholicism.
Throughout the book a reoccurring theme appears as it does often appear in GK’s other works. The theme is that of wonder or amazement at our unique and special world. Chesterton was always quick to point out that the way things are in nature and life should never be taken for granted; we are truly living in an extraordinary "fairyland." Orthodoxy can only be accepted when one accepts that all of this around us is truly worth living for. Chesterton writes:
“No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy”.
G.K. Day: Manalive
When he was still alive, G.K. Chesterton would usually refer to himself as a journalist rather than a Christian apologist, poet, or social critic as the rest of the world usually refers to him today (if they refer to him at all). In addition to writing multiple articles a week for a number of periodicals for over 30 years, Chesterton also wrote dozens of other books. They were collections of poetry, treatises, short stories, and even a number of novels. The following is an excerpt from one of his most interesting novels: Manalive.
In it, an enigmatic individual named Innocent Smith arrives one day at a quaint inn in London. He and his spontaneity, courage, love, and philosophy of life exemplify Chesterton’s beliefs and vision for the way a man should live his life.
"This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments. It is as if a man were found gambling wildly in a gambling hell, and you found that he only played for trouser buttons. It is as if you found a man making a clandestine appointment with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it was his grandmother. Everything is ugly and discreditable, except the facts; everything is wrong about him, except that he has done no wrong.
"It will then be asked, `Why does Innocent Smith continued far into his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false charges?' To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive. He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all. And if you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed with such inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that, though it is one that will not be approved.
"There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don't like it. If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a song-- at least, not a comic song."
"Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy to me or appeals in any particular way to my sympathies. I am an Irishman, and a certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either of the persecutions of my creed, or of my creed itself. Speaking singly, I feel as if a man was tied to tragedy, and there was no way out of the trap of old age and doubt. But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick, this is the way out. If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog, it would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog. Barely and brutally to be good--that may be the road, and he may have found it.”
G.K. Day: Christianity and Rationalism
By: Adam E. Carnehl, Guest Contributor
If one is to study the life and times of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, he will inevitably encounter the biographical work of Maisie Ward. Ms. Ward was GKC’s first major biographer who wrote the definitive biography on him in 1936.
Ms. Ward was a good friend with both Gilbert and and his wife, Frances Chesterton, and she personally interviewed other close Chesterton family friends for her biography as well. This included people such as Hilaire Belloc, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. Ward used these interviews to craft the most accurate and intimate portrait of Chesterton she possibly could.
In the course of the book, she includes excerpts from essays Chesterton wrote between 1903-04, which were in response to a secular-socialist journalist named Robert Blatchford. Blatchford issued a challenge from his journal Clarion to all those who might disagree with his progressive, anti-Christian writings. Chesterton answered the challenge with a handful of brilliant essays that later formed the basis for his classic spiritual autobiography Orthodoxy.
Here is an excerpt from his first essay in that series, entitled: “Christianity and Rationalism”. The excerpt includes the first and last of the four arguments he makes in favor of the Christian faith.
The first of all the difficulties that I have in controverting Mr. Blatchford is simply this, that I shall be very largely going over his own ground. My favourite text-book of theology is Blatchford's God and My Neighbour, but I cannot repeat it in detail. If I gave each of my reasons for being a Christian, a vast number of them would be Mr. Blatchford's reasons for not being one.
For instance, Mr. Blatchford and his school of thought point out that there are many myths parallel to the Christian story; that there were Pagan Christs, and Red Indian Incarnations, and Patagonian Crucifixions, for all I know or care. But does not Mr. Blatchford see the other side of the fact? If the Christian God really made the human race, would not the human race be prone to be interested in rumors and perversions of the Christian God? If the center of our life is a certain fact, would not people far from the center have a muddled version of that fact?
If we are so made that a Son of God must deliver us, is it odd that Patagonians should dream of a Son of God?
...
And, lastly, let me take an example which leads me on directly to the general matter I wish to discuss for the remaining space of the articles at my command. The Secularist constantly points out that the Hebrew and Christian religions began as local things; that their god was a tribal god; that they gave him material form, and attached him to particular places.
This is an excellent example of one of the things that if I were conducting a detailed campaign I should use as an argument for the validity of Biblical experience. For if there really are some other and higher beings than ourselves, and if they in some strange way, at some emotional crisis, really revealed themselves to rude poets or dreamers in very simple times, that these rude people should regard the revelation as local, and connect it with the particular hill or river where it happened, seems to me exactly what any reasonable human being would expect.
It has a far more credible look than if they had talked cosmic philosophy from the beginning.
If they had, I should have suspected "priestcraft" and forgeries and third-century gnosticism.
G.K. Day: The Return
It's been months since I've done it, but starting this week I am ushering in a return to the weekly "G.K. Chesterton Day" here at A Voice in the Wilderness. Once a week I'll post some snippet of Chestertonian wisdom, insight, and/or humor to brighten your day. (FYI: We'll also be introducing a "Dostoyevsky Day" this summer as well!)
This time out, we'll be taking a peek at a poem that serves as the Introduction to G.K.'s classic (short) novel, The Man Who Was Thursday.
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came --
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us
Children we were -- our forts of sand were even as weak as eve,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
When all church bells were silent our cap and beds were heard.
Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain --
Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms.
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the City of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved --
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.
This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells --
Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.
The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand --
Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand?
The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain.
Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.
-G. K. C.
I've always gotten the chills from this poem, and I can't even fully say why. Maybe one of you can tell me why? Or what you think of it?
------------------
(Note: If you have a passage from Chesterton that you would like to submit, send it and an explanation of why you like that particular excerpt to me at rj@rjmoeller.com)
The Final Chapter of Orthodoxy:Revisited
By: R.J. Moeller
I began this project of updating G.K Chesterton's Orthodoxy for one simple reason: it's my favorite book and was written by my favorite author. That combination alone made the task fun and the burden light. It's been an absolute joy to wade through Chesterton's own intellectual journey and do what I can to maintain the integrity of his work while attempting to make the dense text more accessible to modern readers.
You, the aforementioned "modern reader", will be the only worthwhile judge of the success or failure of my aim.
I completely recognize the oddity of an American twenty-something in 2011 obsessing (to put it lightly) over the writings of a British journalist who died roughly 50 years before I was born, but if you've made it this far with me in Orthodoxy, you understand my predicament completely. What is one to do when he comes up against such wit, humor, and compelling explanations for why faith in God is so real and exciting, and why the "answers" of the secular-atheist leave one so practically hopeless and wanting? What, aside from telling everyone who will listen, can someone do when he discovers life-giving wisdom in the pages of a short, nine-chapter personal odyssey that so many people could benefit from if only that odyssey had a contemporary guide willing to point the reader in the right direction when it came to the references, allusions, and illustrations in the book that are suited for someone living in early 20th-century England?
Chesterton is known as a "defender of the faith" in the Catholic church. I am a Protestant (evangelical). I get asked by new people that I meet all the time (after babbling on for an extended amount of time about my devotion to the writings of GKC), "Are you Catholic? And if not, how did this whole Chesterton-fixation happen?" Although it is a crude simile, I often explain to the questioner that I love baseball more than any other sport and that when I meet a fellow (knowledgeable) devotee of America's past-time who happens to root for a different team than my Chicago Cubs I am more excited about the fact that the person shares my unbridled passion for the sport than my exact team. The Cubbies are still my team, and I will go down with that ship (if it isn't already sunk), but I've met Boston Red Sox or San Francisco Giants fans who have increased my understanding of (and love for) the game of baseball more than many of the wishy-washy Cubs fans who love Wrigley because it's a fun place to spend a summer afternoon.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, you might say, has taught me more about "baseball" than any other writer I've found thus far in my life.
And the truth is that I disagree with people in my own church about theological points that matter a great deal to me. One of the unfortunate realities of a fallen world is that even among groups of people who are praying to the same God there will be conflict, confusion, and discrepancies. Some differences are significant and appropriately lead to Christ-followers worshiping in different buildings and in different ways. God is not the problem, we are.
But what I look for when it comes to the education of my heart and mind are voices speaking to the human condition; to the realities of sin; to the humility one must have if he hopes to live a healthy, joy-filled life; to the deep longing to belong to something bigger than ourselves that we all feel; to the only source capable of fulfilling that longing; to the heaven-ordained gift that is the institution of the family; to the sacred nature of the marriage covenant.
Chesterton is such a voice. I hope you will start to listen to it if you haven't already.
Enjoy this final installment of Orthodoxy:Revisited. It's never going to be too late to jump on the GKC bandwagon because these re-tooled chapters will be a permanent part of A Voice in the Wilderness.
Happy reading!
-------
IX – Authority and the Adventurer
The last chapter was concerned with the argument that orthodoxy is not only the only safe guardian of morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty, innovation and true progress. If we wish to topple the exploitative oppressors of this world down we cannot do it with the new, modern doctrine of human perfectibility; but we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin.
If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up beleaguered populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter. If we wish to awaken people to social vigilance and tireless pursuit of moral practice, we cannot help it much by insisting on the Immanent God and the Inner Light of the Quakers: for these are at best reasons for contentment. We can, however, help it much by insisting on the transcendent God and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means divine discontent.
If we wish particularly to assert the idea of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian.
If we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal.
And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we must think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero.
Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favor of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favor of the poor member. The notion of a club is always in favor of the rich one.
And now we come to the crucial question which truly concludes the whole matter.
A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree with me so far, may justly turn around and say:
"You have found a practical philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well. You have found a side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely asserted in Original Sin; all right. You have found a truth in the doctrine of hell; I congratulate you. You are convinced that worshippers of a personal God look outwards and are progressive; I congratulate them. But even supposing that those doctrines do include those truths, why can’t you take the truths and leave the doctrines? Granted that all modern society is trusting the rich too much because it does not allow for human weakness; granted that orthodox ages have had a great advantage because (believing in the Fall) they did allow for human weakness, why can’t you simply allow for human weakness without believing in the Fall? If you have discovered that the idea of damnation represents a healthy idea of danger, why can you not simply take the idea of danger and leave the idea of damnation? If you see clearly the kernel of common sense in the nut of Christian orthodoxy, why can’t you simply take the kernel and leave the nut? Why can’t you (to use that cant phrase of the newspapers which I, as a highly scholarly agnostic, am a little ashamed of using) why can’t you simply take what is good in Christianity, what you can define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible?"
This is the real question; this is the last question; and it is a pleasure to try to answer it.
The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions. If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual convenience to me to believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man's exercise of freewill if I believe that he has got it.
But in this matter I am yet even more definitely a rationalist. I do not propose to turn this book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad to meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more obvious intellectual arena. Here I am only giving an account of my own growth in spiritual certainty.
But I quickly pause here to remark that the more I saw of the common abstract arguments made against the Christian cosmology the less I thought of them. I mean that once I had decided that the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation was common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense. In case some will say that my argument here suffers from the absence of the ordinary explanations that Christian apologists give, I will here very briefly summarize my own arguments and conclusions on the purely objective or scientific truth of the matter.
If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts.
The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that usually does convince the mind. I mean that a man may is less likely to be convinced of a philosophy from reading four books, than he would from reading one book, participating in one battle, viewing one awesome landscape, and spending time with one old friend.
The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion.
Now, the non-Christianity of the average educated man today is almost always, to be fair, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way.
Let us look at a few cases.
Many sensible modern men must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have ruined societies with bitterness and gloom.
Those three anti-Christian arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge. The only objection to them (I discover) is that they are all untrue.
If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humor or imagination) you will observe that the startling thing is not how similar man is to the brutes, but how unlike the brute he actually is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation.
That man and brute are alike is, in a sense, a truism; but, if you acknowledge them to alike, for them to then to so insanely different – well, that is a shock and enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; that he does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; that he does not carve marble or carve turkey for his dinner. People these days often talk of “barbaric” architecture and “debased” art from primitive people. But even a smart animal like an elephant does not build colossal temples of ivory even in a rococo style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material for many camel's-hair paint brushes.
Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an infinitely inferior civilization to our own. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old?
No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but make no mistake: it is a chasm.
We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is perpetually un-domestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So it is that this first superficial reason for materialism (“man is nothing more than a upright-walking animal) is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.
It would be the same if I examined the second of the three rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began in pre-historic ignorance and darkness.
(Note: Chesterton later wrote an entire book refuting this second point entitled The Everlasting Man. I highly recommend it!)
When I did attempt to examine the foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there were none. Science knows nothing concrete or of substance about pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to offer conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence is very much in the other way. In the earliest legends we have, such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods. History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time.
There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of The Fall.
Amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is somehow used against its authenticity. Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it.
I cannot keep pace with these paradoxes.
And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same; the view that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the world and simply discover that they don't. Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and colored dresses and art in the open air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.
Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. 
Imagine with me a group of children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall around the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. The children did not fall over the edge; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.
Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as are often said to make one an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally around. I am left saying, "Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy in the countries of the Catholic Church."
One explanation, at any rate, covers all three: the theory that twice was the natural order interrupted by some explosion or revelation such as people now call "psychic." Once Heaven came upon the earth with a power or seal called the image of God, whereby man took command of Nature; and once again (when in empire after empire men had been found wanting) Heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man. This would explain why the mass of men always look backwards; and why the only corner where they in any sense look forwards is the little continent where Christ has His Church.
I know it will be said that Japan has become progressive. But how can this be an answer when even in saying "Japan has become progressive," we really only mean, "Japan has become European"?
But I wish here not so much to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark. I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed to something other than secularism and atheism.
I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian arguments; if that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the moment another.
The modern intellectual is often attempting to pick-and-choose certain Christian teachings or beliefs that, when combined, create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased. First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, and one who made a feeble appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to follow the Church now would only drag us back to such un-enlightened times; third, that the people who are still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious – such people as the Irish – are weak, unpractical, and behind the times.
I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were un-philosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god – and always like a god.
Christ even had a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the a fortiori. His "how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them.
That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac.
Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other.
The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.
I take in order the next instance offered as an attack on the faith: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern summaries and generalizations; I simply read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.
If anyone says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with skeptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship of Christendom sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top.
This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of rushing waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome.
If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch.
In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it.
How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is done about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite painfully successful.
The poverty of their country, the minority of their members, are simply the conditions under which they were asked to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to leave. These people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden.
And when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the especially hard professions – the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier.
In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion: the skeptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The skeptic is too gullible; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias.
Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average skeptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the alleged connection of the Christian creed with mediaeval darkness, and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt Irish peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?"
There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has incessantly exhibited a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest details of architecture or fashion.
All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome.
That is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all revenants (haunting ghosts); all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life – it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps – ever since.
I have dealt at length with these three arguments given for why men doubt in order to convey my main contention – that my own case for Christianity is rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic or atheist. But the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons.
He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is clearly demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colors and joyful with gold; because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a runaway train.
But among these million facts all flowing one way there is, of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be treated briefly, but by itself; I mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural. In another chapter I have indicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it is orderly. A person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. But my own positive conviction that personal creation is more conceivable than blind and purposeless material fate, is, I admit, in a sense, un-discussable.
I will not call it a faith or an intuition, for those words are mixed up with mere emotion. It is strictly an intellectual conviction; but it is a primary intellectual conviction like the certainty I have that of self or of the good of living. Anyone who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America.
Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old maid when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old maid when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the mistreatment she’s suffered at the hands of her landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both.
Still, you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favor of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a dizzying array of human testimony in favor of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism – the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist.
It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence – it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence and are so constrained directly because of your own secular creed.
But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle.
If I say, "Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious.” If I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.
If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is – that they see ghosts.
Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.
It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it.
He may say that there has been in many miraculous stories a notion of spiritual preparation and acceptance. In short: that the miracle could only have happened to someone who believed in miracles. It may be so, and if this is true, then how are we to test it? If we are inquiring whether certain results follow faith, it is useless to repeat wearily that (if they happen) they do follow faith. If faith is one of the conditions, those without faith have a most healthy right to laugh. But they have no right to judge. Being a believer may be, if you like, as bad as being drunk; still if we were extracting psychological facts from drunkards, it would be absurd to be always taunting them with having been drunk.
Suppose we were investigating whether angry men really saw a red mist before their eyes. Suppose sixty excellent gentlemen swore that when angry they had seen this crimson cloud: surely it would be absurd to answer "Oh, but you admit you were angry at the time." They might reasonably respond, "How the blazes could we discover, without being angry, whether angry people see red?"
So the saints and monks might rationally reply, "Suppose that the question is whether believers can see visions – even then, if you are interested in visions it is no point to object to believers."
You are still arguing in a circle – in that old mad circle with which this book began.
The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of sophistry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living souls in their senses would seriously communicate with each other. The fact that ghosts prefer darkness no more disproves the existence of ghosts than the fact that lovers prefer darkness disproves the existence of love.
If you choose to say, "I will believe that Miss Brown called her fiancé a lamb or, any other endearing term, if she will repeat the word before seventeen psychologists," then I shall reply, "Very well, if those are your conditions, you will never get the truth, for she certainly will not say it." It is just as unscientific as it is un-philosophical to be surprised that in an unsympathetic atmosphere certain extraordinary sympathies do not arise.
It is as if I said that I could not tell if there was a fog because the air was not clear enough; or as if I insisted on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.
As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come about the private intimacy of sex or about the darkness of midnight (well knowing that many details must in their own nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen. I am forced to it by a conspiracy of facts: the fact that the men who encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen, farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualistic incidents but are not spiritualists, the fact that science itself admits such things more and more every day. Science will even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it.
I suggest the Re-galvanization.
But the strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of materialist dogmatism – I may call it “materialist mysticism.” The skeptic always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed. For I hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or trick miracles. That is not an argument at all, good or bad.
A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England – if anything, it proves its existence.
Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur (my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide with one of the worst mental evils of the age. The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men began to use the word "spiritual" as the same as the word "good." They thought that to grow in refinement and incorporeality was to grow in virtue.
When scientific evolution was announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think that so long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel.
But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil.
A man of genius, very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly. Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of the angels. He was indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels. He was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality; but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery, and contempt of all obvious good.
Between this sunken pride and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose, spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them, must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering any other varied types in any other distant continent. It must be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate. If a shade arose from the underworld, and stared at Piccadilly, that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage. He would suppose that the coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking and imprisoned captive.
So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time, we may mistake who is uppermost. It is not enough to find the gods; they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods. We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena – in order to discover which are really natural.
In this light I find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins, quite practical and clear. It does not trouble me to be told that the Hebrew god was one among many. I know he was, without any research to tell me so. Jehovah and Baal looked equally important, just as the sun and the moon looked the same size. It is only slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master, and the small moon only our satellite.
Believing that there is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good. Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water, and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity, where I am literally at home.
And there is only one such place to be found.
I have now said enough to show (to anyone to whom such an explanation is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena of apologetics, a ground of belief. In pure records of experiment (if these be taken democratically without contempt or favor) there is evidence first, that miracles happen, and second that the nobler miracles belong to our tradition. But I will not pretend that this brief discussion is my real reason for accepting Christianity instead of taking the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism.
I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me tomorrow.
Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were clean-shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.
There is one only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell."
No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth tomorrow, as well as today. And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated.
Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man is womanized, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman; but every man is a feminized man. And if ever men march to Westminster to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join their procession.
For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact: that the very time when I was most under a woman's authority, I was most full of flame and adventure. Exactly because when my mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful fulfillments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true. I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn.
Inch by inch I might discover what was the object of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy conjecture as to why my parents kept a cat.
So, since I have accepted Christendom as a mother and not merely as a chance example, I have found Europe and the world once more like the little garden where I stared at the symbolic shapes of cat and rake; I look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. This or that rite or doctrine may look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but I have found by experience that such things end somehow in grass and flowers. A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his existence.
I give one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high human nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world.
Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence – the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach.
Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day.
This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true.
Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right, like my father in the garden.
Theosophists for instance will preach an obviously attractive idea like reincarnation; but if we wait for its logical results, they are spiritual pomposity and the cruelty of the caste system. For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people will tend to despise the beggar. But Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are compassion and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king.
Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium. Orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only afterwards that we realize that jumping was an athletic exercise highly beneficial to our health. It is only afterwards that we realize that this danger is the root of all drama and romance. The strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness. The unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be the very props of the people. The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical self-denials and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.
And its despair is this, that it does not really believe that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots. A man cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy. But a man can expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority. One can find no meanings in a jungle of skepticism; but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through a forest of doctrine and design. Here everything has a story tied to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father's house; for it is my father's house. I end where I began – at the right end.
I have entered at least the gate of all good philosophy. I have come into my second childhood.
But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole matter I will attempt to express it.
All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality. That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall.
In Sir Oliver Lodge's interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were: "What are you?" and "What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?" I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions; but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers.
To the question, "What are you?" I could only answer, "God knows." And to the question, "What is meant by the Fall?" I could answer with complete sincerity, "That whatever I am, I am not myself." This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves. And there is really no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door. It is only since I have known orthodoxy that I have known mental emancipation. But, in conclusion, it has one special application to the ultimate idea of joy.
It is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure sorrow and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere. Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided. And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea.
When the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly; they are dead. And when rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are right. For when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least.
I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything – they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything – they were at war about everything else.
But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus.
Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.
The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.
Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live.
Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one comer of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The skeptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth.
The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it.
Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.
And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His amusement.
End of Orthodoxy
Orthodoxy Revisited: The Romance of Orthodoxy
We are one chapter away from completing the Orthodoxy:Revisited project that began back in January. We have been re-publishing (and slightly updating) G.K. Chesterton's masterpiece, Orthodxy, and hope that you have been enjoying the text. This week we present Chapter 8: The Romance of Orthodoxy. In it, GKC defends his position that Christianity is unique among all the world's religions.
Please do enjoy it, and feel free to post any comments or questions you may have.
-RJM
-----------
VIII – The Romance of Orthodoxy
It is customary these days to complain of the hustle, bustle and strenuousness of our modern time. But in truth, the chief mark of our generation is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human lethargy. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about.
Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous.
And, as this is true of the apparent physical bustle, it is also true of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labor-saving machinery; and it saves mental labor very much more than it ought.
Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make the path of the comfortable and complacent even smoother. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too lazy to walk and think for themselves.
It is a good exercise for the healthy man or woman to try once in a while to express an opinion (on any subject) in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to prison and Brown to decide when Jones should be able to get out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to actually think.
The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.
There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."
But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially damaging and confusing. This difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things.
Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric. In the same way the scientific materialists have had just reason to complain of people mixing up "materialist" as a term of cosmology with "materialist" as a moral taunt. So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates "progressives" in London always calls himself a "progressive" in South Africa.
A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society. It is often suggested that all Liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free. You might just as well say that all idealists ought to be High Churchmen, because they ought to love everything that is high. You might as well say that Low Churchmen ought to like Low Mass, or that Broad Churchmen ought to like broad jokes.
The thing is a mere accident of words.
In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal.
Nay, indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to show.
In the few following pages I propose to point out as rapidly as possible that on every single one of the matters most strongly insisted on by liberalizers of theology their effect upon social practice would be definitely illiberal.
Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas loosely called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these (and we will take them one by one) can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.
In fact, it is a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression. There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression – and that is orthodoxy.
I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as to partly justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
Now let us take in order the innovations that are the notes of the new theology or the modernist church.
We concluded the last chapter with the discovery of one of them. The very doctrine which is called the most old-fashioned was found to be the only safeguard of the new democracies of the earth. The doctrine seemingly most unpopular was found to be the only strength of the people. In short, we found that the only logical negation of oligarchy was in the affirmation of original sin. So it is, I maintain, in all the other cases.
I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them. Why, I cannot imagine, nor can anybody tell me.
For some inconceivable reason a "broad" or "liberal" clergyman always means a man who wishes at the very least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number. It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came out of her grave. It is common to find trouble in a parish because the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water; yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says that his father walked on the Serpentine? And this is not because (as the swift secularist debater would immediately retort) miracles cannot be believed in our experience. It is not because "miracles do not happen," as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited with simple faith.
More supernatural things are alleged to have happened in our time than would have been possible eighty years ago.
Men of science believe in such marvels much more than they did: the most perplexing, and even horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit are always being unveiled in modern psychology. Things that the old science at least would frankly have rejected as miracles are hourly being asserted by the new science. The only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology.
But in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them. It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma, of materialism. The man of the 19th century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it.
Tennyson, a very typical 19th century man, uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in their honest doubt. There was indeed. Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth. In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos.
The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist.
Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will speak afterwards. Here we are only concerned with this clear point; that in so far as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be on either side in the discussion about miracles, it is obviously on the side of miracles. Reform or (in the only tolerable sense) progress means simply the gradual control of matter by mind. A miracle simply means the swift control of matter by mind.
If you wish to feed the people, you may think that feeding them miraculously in the wilderness is impossible – but you cannot think it illiberal. If you really want poor children to go to the seaside, you cannot think it illiberal that they should go there on flying dragons; you can only think it unlikely.
A holiday, like real Liberalism, only means the liberty of man. A miracle only means the liberty of God.
You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea. The Catholic Church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom. Calvinism, in some ways, took away the freedom from man, but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves nothing free in the universe. And those who assist this process are called the "liberal theologians."
This, as I say, is the lightest and most evident case. The assumption that to doubt the existence of miracles is akin to liberality or reform is literally the opposite of the truth. If a man cannot believe in miracles that is an end to the matter; he is not particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honorable and logical, which are much better things. But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so; because these things mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance. Sometimes this truth is ignored in a singularly naïve way, even by the ablest men.
For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw (pictured right) speaks with hearty old-fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort of breach of faith on the part of nature: he seems strangely unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favorite tree: the doctrine of the omnipotence of will. Just in the same way he calls the desire for immortality a worthless selfishness, forgetting that he has just called the desire for life a healthy and heroic selfishness.
How can it be noble to wish to make one's life infinite and yet evil to wish to make it immortal? No, if it is desirable that man should triumph over the cruelty of nature or death, then miracles are certainly desirable; we will discuss afterwards whether they are possible.
But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error; the notion that the "liberalizing" of religion in some way helps the liberation of the world. The second example of it can be found in the question of pantheism – or rather of a certain modern attitude which is often called immanentism, and which often is Buddhism. But this is so much more difficult a matter that I must approach it with rather more preparation.
The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue. Here is a case. There is a phrase of superficial liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach."
It is false; it is the opposite of the fact.
The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach.
It is as if a man were to say, "Do not be misled by the fact that the Church Times (a Catholic publication) and the Freethinker (an atheist publication) look utterly different, that one is painted on papyrus and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other rectangular; read them and you will see that they say the same thing." The truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the fact that they don't say the same thing.
An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella.
It is exactly in their souls that they are divided.
So the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they agree in meaning, but differ in machinery. It is exactly the opposite. They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples, just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers.
Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns.
The great example of this alleged identity of all human religions is the alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity. Those who adopt this theory generally avoid the ethics of most other creeds, except, indeed, Confucianism, which they like because it is not a creed. But they are cautious in their praises of the strictness of Islam. They seldom suggest the Muslim view of marriage (for which there is a great deal to be said) as one that the West should adopt. They have a cold view of religions that are difficult to follow. But in the case of the great religion of Gautama Buddha they feel sincerely a similarity.
Students of popular science, like Mr. Blatchford, are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it. The reasons were of two kinds: resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which were not resemblances at all.
The author of the book I read solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some point in which they are quite obviously different.
And so, in way of a clear example, he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice to come out of the coal-cellar. Or, again, it was gravely urged that these two Eastern teachers, by a remarkable coincidence, both were involved with the washing of feet.
You might as well say that it was a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash.
And the other examples of supposed similarities were those which simply were not similar. Thus this reconciler of the two religions draws serious attention to the fact that at certain religious feasts the robe of the Lama is ripped in pieces out of respect, and the remnants highly valued. But this is the reverse of a resemblance, for the garments of Christ were not torn into pieces out of respect, but out of mockery; and the remnants were not highly valued except for what they would fetch in the rag shops.
It is rather like alluding to the obvious connection between the two ceremonies that involve a sword: there is one when it taps a man's shoulder; and another when it cuts off his head. For the man involved in the ceremony, the two outcomes are not at all similar.
These scraps of trivial sophistry would indeed matter little if it were not also true that the alleged philosophical resemblances are also of these two kinds, either proving too much or not proving anything. That Buddhism approves of mercy or of self-restraint is not to say that it is uniquely like Christianity; it is only to say that it is not utterly unlike all human existence. Buddhists disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess because all sane human beings disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess.
But to say that Buddhism and Christianity give the same philosophy of these things is simply false.
All humanity does agree that we are in a net of sin. Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out. But as to what is the way out, I do not think that there are two institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly as Buddhism and Christianity.
Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me; I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style of representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple.
The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that.
Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances.
The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.
If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things.
A short time ago Mrs. Annie Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man.
If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbors; she tells us to be our neighbors.
That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree.
I want to love my neighbor not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a mirror – because it is one's self – but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different.
If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. But upon Mrs. Besant's principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.
It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and immanence. And it is just here that Christianity is on the side of humanity and liberty and love. Love desires personality; therefore love desires division.
It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say "little children love one another" rather than to tell one large person to love himself.
This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God – the whole point of his cosmic idea.
The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine center of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. The oriental deity is like a giant who lost his leg or hand and is always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him.
We come back to the same tireless note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls. But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God and man is sacred, because this is eternal.
So that a man may love God it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to love him. All those vague theosophical minds for whom the universe is an immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which shrink instinctively from that earth-shattering saying of our Gospels, which declare that the Son of God came not with peace but with a sundering sword. The saying rings entirely true even considered as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches real love is bound to produce hate in some who hear his words. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed.
Yet there is another and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance of our Lord. According to Himself, the Son was a sword separating brother and brother that they should for an eon hate each other. But the Father also was a sword, which in the black beginning separated brother and brother, so that they should love each other at last.
This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the eyes of the mediaeval saint in the picture. This is the meaning of the sealed eyes of the superb Buddhist image. The Christian saint is happy because he has verily been cut off from the world; he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment. But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things? – since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can hardly be astonished at itself.
There have been many pantheist poems suggesting wonder, but no really successful ones. The pantheist cannot wonder, for he cannot praise God or praise anything as really distinct from himself.
Our immediate business here, however, is with the effect of this Christian admiration (which strikes outwards, towards a deity distinct from the worshipper) upon the general need for ethical activity and social reform. And surely its effect is sufficiently obvious. There is no real possibility of getting out of pantheism, any special impulse to moral action. For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to another.
Swinburne in the high summer of his skepticism tried in vain to wrestle with this difficulty. In "Songs before Sunrise," written under the inspiration of Garibaldi and the revolt of Italy he proclaimed the newer religion and the purer God which should wither up all the priests of the world:
"What doest thou now
Looking Godward to cry
I am I, thou art thou,
I am low, thou art high,
I am thou that thou seekest to find him,
find thou but thyself, thou art I."
Of which the immediate and evident deduction is that tyrants are as much the sons of God as Garibaldis; and that King Bomba of Naples having, with the utmost success, "found himself" is identical with the ultimate good in all things.
The truth is that the western energy that dethrones tyrants has been directly due to the western theology that says "I am I, thou art thou."
The same spiritual separation which looked up and saw a good king in the universe looked up and saw a bad king in Naples. The worshippers of Bomba's god dethroned Bomba. The worshippers of Swinburne's god have covered Asia for centuries and have never dethroned a tyrant. The Indian saint may reasonably shut his eyes because he is looking at that which is I and Thou and We and They and It. It is a rational occupation: but it is not true in theory and not true in fact that it helps the Indian to keep an eye on Lord Curzon. That external vigilance which has always been the mark of Christianity (the command that we should watch and pray) has expressed itself both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics: but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different from ourselves, a deity that disappears.
Certainly the wisest creeds around the globe may suggest that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper rings of the labyrinth of our own ego. But only we of Christendom have said that we should hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains: and we have killed all monsters in the chase.
Here again, therefore, we find that in so far as we value democracy and the self-renewing energies of the west, we are much more likely to find them in the old theology than the new. If we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy: especially in this matter (so much disputed in the counsels of Mr. R. J. Campbell), the matter of insisting on the immanent or the transcendent deity.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference – the theology of Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation – Christendom.
Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.
If we take any other doctrine that has been called old-fashioned we shall find the case the same. It is the same, for instance, in the deep matter of the Trinity. Unitarians (a sect never to be mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual dignity and high intellectual honor) are often reformers by the accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude. But there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity.
The complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but He is far less likely to tolerate the mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the lonely god of a Muslim. The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king. The heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world.
For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not well for man to be alone." The social instinct asserted itself everywhere as when the Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled by the Western idea of monks. So even asceticism became brotherly; and the Trappists were sociable even when they were silent.
If this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian. For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence) – to us God Himself is a society. It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology, and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here. Suffice it to say here that this triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside; that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart: but out of the desert, from the dry places and, the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar (pictured right) in hand have laid waste the world.
For it is not well for God to be alone.
Again, the same is true of that difficult matter of the danger of the soul, which has unsettled so many just minds. To hope for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable. It is tenable, but it is not especially favorable if you are trying to spur people on to activity or progress. Our fighting and creative society ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact that every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice.
To say that all will be well no matter what is a comprehensible remark: but it cannot be called the blast of a trumpet. Europe ought rather to emphasize possible perdition; and Europe always has emphasized it. Here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances. To the Buddhist, or the eastern fatalist, existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way.
In a thrilling novel (a purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't.
In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man "damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.
All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? – that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking.
The eons are easy enough to think about; anyone can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis.
There is a great deal of real similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next issue." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serialized story and leaves off at the most exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.
But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like.
When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to Juliet's old nurse if he had felt so inclined. And Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the theological free-will.
It is a large matter and too much to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this is the real objection to that stream of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods.
The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.
If you say that you are going to cure a sinner as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is, "Show me these people who desire to be asthmatic who are supposedly just as many in number as all those who actively desire to indulge in their sins.” A man may lie still and be cured of an illness. But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently.
The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word which we use for a man in the hospital. “Patient" is in the passive mood; "sinner" is in the active. If a man is to be saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging, he must be not a patient but an impatient. He must be personally impatient with forgery.
All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will.
Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. In so far as we desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions which have distinguished European civilization, we shall not discourage the thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it. If we want, like the Eastern (Buddhist) saints, merely to contemplate how right things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right. But if we particularly want to make them go right, we must insist that they may go wrong.
Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ. The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end. But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all spiritual rebels forever.
Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.
Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall short or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach.
But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.
And now let the revolutionaries choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their feelings of isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.
These can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy, of which the chief merit is that it is the natural fountain of revolution and reform; and of which the chief defect is that it is obviously only an abstract assertion. Its main advantage is that it is the most adventurous and manly of all theologies. Its chief disadvantage is simply that it is a theology.
It can always be urged against it that it is in its nature arbitrary and in the air. But it is not so high in the air but that great intellectual archers spend their whole secular lives attempting to shoot philosophical arrows at it – yes, and they shoot until the last of their arrows; there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their civilization if they may ruin also the old fantastic tale found in the Old and New Testaments.
This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and the torches that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they are able to fight the Church. This is no exaggeration; I could fill a book with the instances of it.
Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in maneuvering so as to maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity.
I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartle-pool.
I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young.
I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture.
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne.
He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic (i.e. the “golden rule”) by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon someone who he is certain never lived at all.
And yet Christianity hangs in the heavens nearly unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political courage and common sense.
They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God; how could they prove it? They only prove (from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia. They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God; they only prove that the nearest criminal should not be punished by men.
With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here.
With their paralyzing hints that all conclusions come out wrong in the end, that there is no tru reality, they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove.
Not only is the orthodox faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of all worldly confusion.
The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.
The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid the world to waste.
Orthodoxy Revisited: The Eternal Revolution
We are seven weeks into a nine-week G.K. Chesterton excursion. Our Orthodoxy: Revisited series is an attempt to bring Chesterton's masterpiece to a 21st century audience. This week's chapter, The Eternal Revolution, digs deeper into just what kind of world Chesterton believes the "natural man" should want to live in.
Happy Reading!
----------
VII – The Eternal Revolution
So far in this book, the following propositions have been stated: First, that some faith in our life is required, even if only to improve it; second, that some dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary if one has any hope of living a satisfied life; third, that to have this blend of necessary content and necessary discontent it is not sufficient to have the “equilibrium” that was preached by the Stoics (or the “ying and yang” of Eastern religions).
For to merely resign from fighting life’s unavoidable battles has neither the gigantic joy of pleasure nor the superb hatred of suffering. To be a healthy person, one ought to have some deeply-held objection to the advice that one ought to merely “grin and bear it.”
The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin.
Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do – because they are architectural creations springing forth from Christian sensibilities. And when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense) frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful (to those who have never experienced it).
Christ prophesied the inevitability of extravagant Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and respectable people of his day (like the people in our day who object to the type of music enjoyed by the working class in their working class churches) objected to the shouts of praise for Jesus coming from the working class people of Jerusalem.
He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out." Under the holy influence of His spirit there arose in the Middle Ages, like a clamorous chorus, the facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, adorned with shouting faces and open mouths.
The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.
If you will concede these points of mine, even if only for arguments sake, then we may pick right back up where we left off. We were speaking of the things needed for the “natural man” to live a worthwhile life. We can now ask the next question that is so obviously in front of us.
We all want a better life, a better world – to make things better – but what do we mean by making things better?
Most modern talk on this matter is nothing more than circular logic, arguing in a circle – that same circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and of pure rationalism (devoid of mysticism or spirituality). Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it helps evolution. The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise on the elephant.
Obviously, it will not do to find our answer from what we see in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human or divine theory), there is no coherent principle in nature. For instance, the contemptible anti-democrat of today will tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see the logical addition one must make to this statement.
There is no equality in nature, but there is also no inequality in nature.
Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable than others.
But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, and longed for death, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might rejoice to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture that is conscious existence.
It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse.
You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.
We cannot, then, get the standard for “What is better?” from nature itself, and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from God.
We must have our own vision.
But the attempts of most moderns to express what it is they want are highly vague.
Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man of the first mental caliber carelessly uses the phrase that human morality is “behind the times” and never up to date. How can anything be up to date? A date has no character. How can one say that Christmas celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth of a month?
What the man meant, of course, was that the majority of people are out-of-step with his progressive minority – or as I would venture, in front of it.
Other vague modern people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without hesitation or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the “old’ morality.
Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high." Talking like this is, at least, the reverse of intellectual; it is a meaningless phrase. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Thomas Aquinas. "Tommy lived the higher life" is a crass metaphor from a bizarre mind.
This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and evocative thinker; but he was quite the opposite of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in plain, conceptual words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet.
He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense.
So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are actual ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if a genius like Nietzsche does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists you may meet at a dinner party, who also talk about things being "higher," doesn’t know either.
Then again, some people fall back on complete submission and sitting still. Nature is going to do something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. We have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting. If anything happens it is right: if anything is prevented it was wrong.
Then there are some people who try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything. Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs. Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.
Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate aim of evolution. And these are the only sensible people. This is the only really healthy way to use the word evolution: to work for what you want, and to call that evolution. The only comprehensible sense that progress or advance can have among men, is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make the whole world like that vision.
If you like to put it so, the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the mere method and preparation for something that we have to create. This is not a world, but rather the material for a world. God has given us not so much the colors of a picture as the colors of a palette. But he has also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision. We must be clear about what we want to paint.
This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to.
We need not debate about the mere words “evolution” or “progress”: personally I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form. It implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image; to make it something that we see already in our minds.
Evolution is a metaphor relating to a causeless unrolling of events. Progress is merely a metaphor relating to walking along a road – and very likely the wrong road.
But reform is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means that we see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape. And we know what shape.
It is here where we find the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Tragically, progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy. One word from a German intellectual makes men today doubt.
Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us.
We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.
Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favorite color every day, he would get on slowly.
But if he altered his favorite color every day, he would not get on at all.
If, after reading a fresh new philosopher assigned to him by his secular professor, he started to paint everything red or yellow, his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner.
This is exactly the position of the average modern thinker.
It will be said by my critics and intellectual opponents that this is a preposterous example. But it is literally the fact of recent history.
The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belonged to the black-and-white, objective truth era when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not infrequently in Revolution.
And whatever each man believed in he hammered away at it steadily, without skepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell.
It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative.
But in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition in Radicalism to pull anything down. There is a great deal of truth in Lord Hugh Cecil's suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief.
Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same.
The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy – the plain fruit of all of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished.
It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs, unwittingly upheld and supported the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself.
Again, it may be said that this instance is remote or extreme. But, again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around us. It is true that the negro slave, being treated like a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see every day – the worker in Mr. Thomas Gradgrind's factory (a character in Dickens’ novel Hard Times), the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office – he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature. He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day.
The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the dreariness of the factory. The only man who gains by all the radical and changing philosophies is a greedy, exploitative man like Gradgrind. It would be well worth his while to keep his workers supplied with skeptical literature. And, now that I come to think of it, Gradgrind in the story is famous for building libraries. He shows his sense. All modern books are on his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized.
The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.
This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed; it must be fixed.
The artist Whistler used to make many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up twenty portraits. But it would matter if he looked up twenty times, and each time saw a new person sitting calmly for his portrait. So it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful. But it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitless.
The question therefore becomes this: How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art? How can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always satisfied with working? How can we make sure that the portrait painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking the natural and more human course of throwing the person sitting for the portrait out of window?
A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling. This fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of revolution. Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas; but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas.
If I am merely to float or fade or evolve, it may be towards something like anarchy (which I may not want); but if I am to rebel, it must be for something respectable.
This is the whole weakness of certain schools of progress and moral evolution. They suggest that there has been a slow movement towards morality, with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant. There is only one great disadvantage in this theory. It talks of a slow movement towards justice; but it does not permit a swift movement.
A man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things to be fundamentally intolerable.
To make the matter clear, it is better to take a specific example. Certain of the idealistic vegetarians, such as Mr. Salt, say that the time has now come for eating no meat; by implication they assume that at one time it was right to eat meat, and they suggest (in words that could be quoted) that some day it may be wrong to eat milk and eggs. I am not interested here in the discussion of what “justice to animals” exactly looks like. I only choose to say that whatever justice looks like, it should be prompt justice. If an animal is wronged, we ought to be able to rush to his rescue.
But how can we rush if we are, perhaps, in advance of our time? How can we rush to catch a train which may not arrive for a few centuries? How can I denounce a man for torturing cats, if he is only now what I may possibly become in drinking a glass of milk in 20 years?
A splendid and insane Russian cult made its name by stealing any animals that were used to pull carts. How can I muster up enough courage to take the hose out of the hansom-cab, when I do not know whether my evolutionary watch is only a little fast or the cabman's a little slow? Suppose a former slave owner says to an abolitionist, "Slavery suited one stage of evolution." And suppose he answers, "And abolitionism suits this stage of evolution." How can one adequately answer if there is no eternal test? If the abolition of slavery can be behind the current morality, why should not philanthropists be in front of it? What on earth is the current morality, except in its literal sense – the morality that is always running away?
Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the progressive as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish the king's orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish the king to be promptly executed.
The guillotine has many sins, but to do it justice there is nothing evolutionary about it.
The favorite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in the axe. The Evolutionist says, "Where do you draw the line?" the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it here: exactly between your head and body."
There must at any given moment be an abstract right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something eternal if there is to be anything sudden. Therefore for all intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping things as they are, for establishing a system forever, as in China, or for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution, it is equally necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision. This is our first requirement.
When I had written this down, I felt once again the presence of something else in the discussion: as a man hears a church bell above the sound of the street.
Something seemed to be saying, "My ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world. My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called Eden. You may alter the place to which you are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come. To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world, hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has seen since Adam. No unchanging custom, no changing evolution can make the original good anything but good. Man may have had concubines as long as cows have had horns: still they are not a part of him if they are sinful. Men may have been under oppression ever since fish were under water; still they ought not to be, if oppression is sinful. The chain may seem as natural to the slave, or the makeup to the prostitute, as does the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still they are not, if they are sinful. I lift my prehistoric legend to defy all your history. Your vision is not merely a fixture: it is a fact."
I paused to note the new coincidence of Christianity: but I passed on.
I passed on to the next necessity of any ideal of progress. Some people (as we have said) seem to believe in an automatic and impersonal progress in the nature of things. But it is clear that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active, but rather a reason for being lazy.
If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve.
The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive. But it is to none of these obvious comments that I wish primarily to call attention.
The only important point is this: that if we suppose improvement to be natural, it must be fairly simple. The world might conceivably be working towards one consummation, but hardly towards any particular arrangement of many qualities. To return to our original analogy: Nature by herself may be growing more blue; that is, a process so simple that it might be impersonal. But Nature cannot be making a careful picture made of many picked colors, unless Nature is personal.
If the end of the world were mere darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and inevitably as dusk or dawn. But if the end of the world is to be a piece of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro (strong contrasts between light and dark), then there must be design in it, either human or divine.
The world, through mere time, might grow black like an old picture, or white like an old coat; but if it is turned into a particular piece of black and white art – then there is an artist.
If the distinction isn’t evident to you, I offer you an ordinary instance of what I mean. We constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians; I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity. They suggest that through the ages we have been growing more and more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not, have been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice. They say that we once thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but I am not here concerned with their history, which is highly unhistorical.
As a fact, cannibalism is certainly a decadent thing, not a primitive one. It is much more likely that modern men will eat human flesh out of pretentiousness than that primitive man ever ate it out of ignorance. I am here only following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants.
I think it wrong to sit on a man. Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse. Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair. That is the drive of the argument. And for this argument it can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress. A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might – one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children. This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.
Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws.
If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the Garden of Eden. For the stubborn reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother.
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.
This, however, is hardly our main point at present; I have admitted it only in order to show how constantly, and as it were accidentally, the key would fit the smallest doors.
Our main point is here, that if there be a mere trend of impersonal improvement in Nature, it must presumably be a simple trend towards some simple triumph. One can imagine that some automatic tendency in biology might work for giving us longer and longer noses. But the question is, do we want to have longer and longer noses? I fancy not; I believe that we most of us want to say to our noses, "thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed:" we require a nose of such length as may ensure an interesting face.
But we cannot imagine a mere biological trend towards producing interesting faces; because an interesting face is one particular arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth, in a most complex relation to each other. Proportion cannot be adrift: it is either an accident or a design.
So it is with the ideal of human morality and its relation to the humanitarians and the anti-humanitarians. It is conceivable that we are going more and more to keep our hands off things: not to drive horses; not to pick flowers. We may eventually be bound not to disturb a man's mind by even arguing at all; not to disturb the sleep of birds even by coughing. The ultimate apotheosis would appear to be that of a man sitting quite still, nor daring to stir for fear of disturbing a fly, nor to eat for fear of incommoding a microbe. To so crude a consummation as that we might perhaps unconsciously drift. But do we want so crude a consummation?
Similarly, we might unconsciously evolve along the opposite or Nietzschian line of development – superman crushing superman in one tower of tyrants until the universe is smashed up for fun. But do we want the universe smashed up for fun?
Is it not quite clear that what we really hope for is one particular management and proposition of these two things; a certain amount of restraint and respect, a certain amount of energy and mastery? If our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy-tale, we shall have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy-tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear.
If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairy-tale. The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and arrogant enough to defy. So our attitude to the giant of the world must not merely be increasing delicacy or increasing contempt: it must be one particular proportion of the two – which is exactly right.
We must have in us enough reverence for all things outside us to make us tread fearfully on the grass. We must also have enough disdain for all things outside us, to make us, on due occasion, spit at the stars. Yet these two things (if we are to be good or happy) must be combined, not in any combination, but in one particular combination. The perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance.
Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.
This, then, is our second requirement for the ideal of progress.
First, it must be fixed; second, it must be composite. It must not (if it is to satisfy our souls) be the mere victory of some one thing swallowing up everything else, love or pride or peace or adventure; it must be a definite picture composed of these elements in their best proportion and relation.
I am not concerned at this moment to explain exactly what or who can give us a fixed goal to aim at. I only point out that if this composite happiness is fixed for us it must be fixed by some mind; for only a mind can place the exact proportions of a composite happiness. If the beatification of the world is a mere work of nature, then it must be as simple as the freezing of the world, or the burning up of the world. But if the beatification of the world is not a work of nature but a work of art, then it involves an artist.
And here again my contemplation was divided in two by the ancient voice which said, "I could have told you all this a long time ago. If there is any certain progress it can only be my kind of progress, the progress towards a complete city of virtues and dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other. An impersonal force might be leading you to a wilderness of perfect flatness or a peak of perfect height. But only a personal God can possibly be leading you (if, indeed, you are being led) to a city with just streets and architectural proportions, a city in which each of you can contribute exactly the right amount of your own color to the many colored coat of Joseph."
Twice again, therefore, Christianity had come in with the exact answer that I required. I had said, "The ideal must be fixed," and the Church had answered, "Mine is literally fixed, for it existed before anything else."
I said secondly, "It must be artistically combined, like a picture"; and the Church answered, "Mine is quite literally a picture, for I know who painted it."
Then I went on to the third thing, which, as it seemed to me, was needed for an Utopia or goal of progress. And of all the three it is infinitely the hardest to express. Perhaps it might be put thus: that we need watchfulness even in Utopia, lest we fall from Utopia as we fell from Eden.
We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being a strict conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But for many, conservatism (and libertarianism) is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things.
An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. 
It is the custom in short-lived romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. Thus England went mad with joy over the patriotic monarchy of Elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards) went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles the First.
So, again, in France the monarchy became intolerable, not just after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored. The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined.
So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the Radical manufacturer of the Industrial Revolution was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people, until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a tyrant eating the people like bread.
So again, we have almost up to the last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion. Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they are obviously nothing of the kind. They are, by the nature of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men.
We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty.
It is the new rulers, the unethical capitalist or the editor with a bone-to-pick, who really hold up the modern world. There is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution; it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its back; he will take no advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness, of the fact that he is free from criticism and publicity. For the king is the most private person of our time.
It will not be necessary for anyone to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.
This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn oppressive is the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory of progress to allow. It must always be on the lookout for every privilege being abused, for every working right becoming a wrong. In this matter I am entirely on the side of the revolutionists. They are really right to be always suspecting human institutions; they are right not to put their trust in princes nor in any child of man. The chieftain chosen to be the friend of the people becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told.
Here, I say, I felt that I was really at last on the side of the revolutionary.
And then I caught my breath again: for I remembered that I was once again on the side of the orthodox.
Christianity spoke again and said: "I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the “doctrine of progress.” If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is – the Fall."
I have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a sword; here I confess it came in like a battle-axe. For really (when I came to think of it) Christianity is the only thing left that has any real right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred. I have listened often enough to Socialists, or even to democrats, saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally degraded. I have listened to scientific men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions the vice and crime among them will disappear. I have listened to them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination. For it was like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on.
If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike democracy dead.
If the poor are really and utterly demoralized, it may or may not be practical to raise them. But it is certainly quite practical to deprive them. If the man with bad and nasty habits cannot give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall give no vote. The governing class may not unreasonably say: "It may take us some time to reform his habits. But if he is the brute you say, it will take him very little time to ruin our country. Therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance."
It fills me with horrible amusement to observe the way in which the earnest Socialist industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy, expounding weakly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule. It is like listening to somebody at an evening party apologizing for entering without evening dress, and explaining that he had recently been intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off his clothes in the street, and had, moreover, only just changed from prison uniform. At any moment, one feels, the host might say that really, if it was as bad as that, he need not come in at all.
So it is when the ordinary Socialist or progressive liberal, with a beaming face, proves that the poor, after their smashing experiences, cannot be really trustworthy. At any moment the rich may say, "Very well, then, we won't trust them," and bang the door in his face.
On the basis of Mr. Robert Blatchford's Socialist view of heredity and environment, the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming. If clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them?
On the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest. The comfortable, upper class must be our front line and overseer in Utopia.
Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides? Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul? As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer is Christianity. Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich.
For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man.
Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the spacious environment. I know that the most modern manufacturers have been occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest – if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this – that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy.
Christianity, even when watered down, is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
The basic, minimum teachings of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable.
You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.
It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.
A Christian may consistently say, "I respect that man's rank, although he takes bribes." But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, "a man of that rank would not take bribes." For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may take bribes. It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history.
When people say that a man "in that position" would be incorruptible, there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion. Did Lord Bacon, a powerful and corrupt man, shine shoes? No, he was wealthy and well-bred. In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.
Much vague and sentimental journalism has been poured out to the effect that Christianity is akin to democracy, and most of it is scarcely strong or clear enough to refute the fact that the two things have often quarreled. The real ground upon which Christianity and democracy are one is very much deeper. The one specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea of Thomas Carlyle – the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule. Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen.
If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this – that the man should rule who does not think that he can rule. Carlyle's hero may say, "I will be king"; but the Christian saint must say "Nolo episcopari." If the great paradox of Christianity means anything, it means this – that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unfit to wear it.
Carlyle was quite wrong; we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule. Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't.
Now, this is one of the two or three vital defenses of working democracy. The mere machinery of voting is not democracy, though at present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method. But even the machinery of voting is profoundly Christian in this practical sense – that it is an attempt to get at the opinion of those who would be too modest to offer it. It is a mystical adventure; it is an especially trusting thing to offer to those who do not trust themselves. That enigma is strictly peculiar to Christendom.
There is nothing really humble about the abnegation of the Buddhist; the mild Hindu is mild, but he is not meek. But there is something “psychologically” Christian about the idea of seeking for the opinion of the obscure rather than taking the obvious course of accepting the opinion of the prominent. To say that voting is particularly Christian may seem somewhat curious. To say that canvassing is Christian may seem quite crazy. But canvassing is very Christian in its primary idea. It is encouraging the humble; it is saying to the modest man, "Friend, go up higher." Or if there is some slight defect in canvassing, that is, in its perfect and rounded piety, it is only because it may possibly neglect to encourage the modesty of the canvasser.
Aristocracy is not an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one. It is simply the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and obvious affair in the world.
It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern "force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air.
Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of "levitation." They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art.
Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will lift him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation.
Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a joyful self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good London Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.
For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.
Satan fell by the force of gravity.
Now, it is the peculiar honor of Europe since it has been Christian that while it has had aristocracy it has always at the back of its heart treated aristocracy as a weakness – generally as a weakness that must be allowed for. If anyone wishes to appreciate this point, let him go outside Christianity into some other philosophical atmosphere. Let him, for instance, compare the classes of Europe with the castes of India. There aristocracy is far more awful, because it is far more intellectual. It is seriously felt that the scale of classes is a scale of spiritual values; that the baker is better than the butcher in an invisible and sacred sense.
But no version of Christianity, not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a duchess was better than a butcher in that sacred sense. No Christianity, however ignorant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke could not be damned simply for being a duke.
In pagan society there may have been (I do not know) some such serious division between the free man and the slave. But in Christian society we have always thought the gentleman a sort of joke, though I admit that in some great crusades and councils he earned the right to be called a practical joke. But we in Europe never really and at the root of our souls took aristocracy seriously. It is only an occasional non-European alien (such as Dr. Oscar Levy, the only intelligent Nietzscheite) who can even manage for a moment to take aristocracy seriously.
It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously.
In short, I had spelled out slowly, as usual, the need for an equal law in Utopia; and, as usual, I found that Christianity had been there before me. The whole history of my Utopia has the same amusing sadness. I was always rushing out of my architectural study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old.
For me, in the ancient and partly in the modern sense, God answered the prayer, "Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings." Without vanity, I really think there was a moment when I could have invented the marriage vow (as an institution) out of my own head; but I discovered, with a sigh, that it had been invented already. But, since it would be too long a business to show how, fact by fact and inch by inch, my own conception of Utopia was only answered in the New Jerusalem, I will take this one case of the matter of marriage as indicating the converging drift, I may say the converging crash of all the rest.
When the ordinary opponents of Socialism talk about impossibilities and alterations in human nature they always miss an important distinction. In modern ideal conceptions of society there are some desires that are possibly not attainable: but there are some desires that are not desirable.
That all men should live in equally beautiful houses is a dream that may or may not be attained. But that all men should live in the same beautiful house is not a dream at all; it is a nightmare.
That a man should love all old women is an ideal that may not be attainable. But that a man should regard all old women exactly as he regards his mother is not only an unattainable ideal, but an ideal which ought not to be attained.
I do not know if the reader agrees with me in these examples; but I will add the example which has always affected me most. I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself (i.e. make contracts, get married). Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun.
To take an obvious instance, it would not be worthwhile to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. Now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. And the perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfillments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing.
You could not even make a fairy tale from the experiences of a man who, when he was swallowed by a whale, might find himself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or when he was turned into a frog might begin to behave like a flamingo. For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable.
Christian marriage is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it is the chief subject and center of all our romantic writing.
And this is my last instance of the things that I should ask, and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I should ask Utopia to avenge my honor on myself.
All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. "You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there."
RJ's Social Network
Read RJ’s Columns/Blogs
What is “Mere Conservatism”?
Video of RJ
Rudy the Dog barks at "change"
Books You Need to Read
Wall Street Journal
Blogroll
- Acton Power Blog
- Big Government
- Big Hollywood
- Black and Red
- Conservative Daily Blog
- Dad's blog
- Dennis Prager (The Master)
- Desiring God (John Piper)
- Doug Giles (Clash Radio)
- Education News
- Hugh Hewitt
- Jihad Watch
- Mere Orthodoxy
- Michael Medved
- Milton Friedman
- Mom's blog
- My LOST blog
- Only Good Movies
- Patriots Corner
- Remnant Culture
- Shot In The Dark
- Stiletto Blog
- Subscribe via RSS
- The Straight Hype
- Twitter Me
Columnists You Need to Read
- Ann Coulter
- Charles Krauthammer
- Christopher Hitchens
- George Will
- Jonah Goldberg
- Karl Rove
- Mark Steyn
- Marvin Olasky
- Thomas Sowell
- Tony Blankley
- Walter E. Williams
Music/Entertainment
News/Politics
- Drudge Report
- Fact Check
- Fox News
- Hot Air
- Jerusalem Post
- National Review
- Real Clear Politics
- Townhall
- Washington Times
- Weekly Standard