Orthodoxy

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Orthodoxy


Aristocracy is not an institution: aristocracy is a sin;
generally a very venial one. It is merely 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 bear 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 gay
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 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 honour 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 any one 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 Christianity,
not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet
was better than a butcher in that sacred sense. No Christianity,
however ignorant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke would
not be damned. 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.
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
worth while 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 fulfilments 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 centre 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 honour 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."



VIII THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY


It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness
of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch 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 repose.
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 this which is true of the apparent physical
bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect.
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery;
and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.
Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods
to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.
Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they
are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk
and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once
in a way to express any opinion one holds 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 gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish
Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,"
you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged
to 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
ruinous 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 liberalisers 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 partly to 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 cause a "broad" or "liberal" clergyman always
means a man who wishes at 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 nineteenth 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 nineteenth 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 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 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 there is something in the doubt of miracles akin
to liberality or reform is literally the opposite of the truth.
If a man cannot believe in miracles there is an end of the matter;
he is not particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honourable
and logical, which are much better things. But if he can believe
in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so;
because they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly,
its control over the tyranny of circumstance. Sometimes this truth
is ignored in a singularly naive way, even by the ablest men.
For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw 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 favourite tree,
the doctrine of the omnipotence of will. Just in the same way he calls
the desire for immortality a paltry 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
mean to wish to make it immortal? No, if it is desirable that man
should triumph over the cruelty of nature or custom, 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 "liberalising" 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 facile 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
and the FREETHINKER look utterly different, that one is painted
on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular
and the other hectagonal; 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 Mahommedanism, generally confining themselves to imposing
its morality only upon the refreshment of the lower classes.
They seldom suggest the Mahommedan view of marriage (for which
there is a great deal to be said), and towards Thugs and fetish
worshippers their attitude may even be called cold. But in the
case of the great religion of Gautama 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 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. Thus, as a case of the first class,
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 singular coincidence, both had
to do 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 class of similarities were those which simply were not similar.
Thus this reconciler of the two religions draws earnest attention
to the fact that at certain religious feasts the robe of the Lama
is rent 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 rent in pieces out of respect, but out of derision;
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 of the sword: when it taps
a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head. It is not at all
similar for the man. These scraps of puerile pedantry 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 specially 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.